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34416
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Rocker Ted Nugent evaded the draft in the 1960s by taking drugs and acting crazy.
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So, Ted Nugent did have a student deferment for part of the time he was eligible for the Vietnam-era draft, but he also did fail a physical examination and receive a medical exemption (which, as far as we know, he has neither acknowledged nor explained). But in the absence of more specific information about the results of that physical examination and the reasons for his medical exemption, it cannot be ascertained how truthful the account Nugent gave to High Times magazine back in 1977 might be. (Ted Nugent’s press representative did not respond to a request for additional information about this subject.)
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unproven
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Uncategorized, ted nugent
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If various rock ‘n’ roll memoirs are to be believed, nearly every American musical group of the 1960s had at least one member who evaded the Vietnam-era draft by scheming to fail a physical examination through some combination of drug use, sleep deprivation, neglected hygiene, deliberate starvation, feigned homosexuality, and assumed bizarre behavior. Johnny Rogan’s biography of the Byrds, for example, describes such plotting by two of the group’s members, frontman Gene Clark and drummer Michael Clarke: Gene had previous escaped [the draft] due to a knee injury incurred when he played football in his teens. But the diagnosis of Osgood-Schlatters disease was remedied by rest and physiotherapy, so it was not long before he was re-examined. This time, he feigned madness, employing whatever drugs were at his disposal to enhance the desired effects. “Gene was living with me at the time,” Clarke told me. “We did a programme and it was hard getting Gene out of the draft. They weren’t buying that bullshit about his leg. I kept him up for a week. Thanks to massive amounts of dexedrine he screwed up all the tests. They looked up his ass. It was seriously demeaning. But we were the best of brothers and I helped get him out.” “When I went in, it was major shit. I wore these stupid pants and sandals. I sat there cross-legged and suggested I had a problem. They were waiting for somebody to try and get out and their attitude was ‘You’re front line, dude.’ I got through the tests. There was a form with the question, ‘Are you a homosexual?’ I wrote ‘No!’, then changed it to ‘Yes’, then ‘No’ again, then crossed it out a few times. I knew all the answers and freaked out. I followed the yellow line and I had to take a piss. They give you this thing to carry and I threw it down on the floor and went over in the corner and took a piss. The guy said, ‘This is very serious … You can’t do that!’ I turned around and accidentally ended up pissing on him. Then somebody tried to take my stuff, so I jumped in and said, ‘Take your hands off my stuff or I’ll kill you. I’m serious’ I’d got my hands round this guy’s neck. Right away, they sent me to the psychiatrist’s office. They were looking at me thinking, ‘Is he for real or is he bullshitting us?’ There was one guy there with long hair who went to Vietnam, but I didn’t. You had to be good. The psychiatrist asked me, ‘Have you ever done it with a woman?’ I said, ‘No!’ He said, ‘Have you ever wanted to?’ I said, ‘No!’ He said, ‘Have you ever done it with a man?’ I said, ‘No!’ He was just looking at me — that’s all he was doing. Finally, he said, ‘Get the hell out of here.’ They ran me down the red line and booted my ass out of there — ‘Get out of here, you faggot bastard, schizoid homosexual, not fit for military service at any time — 4-F.’ I ran out the door, jumped in my Porsche, beat it back to the beach and was laughing all the way. If you think I wanted to go to Vietnam, you were out of your mind. I was making too much goddamn money.” In an interview with published by High Times magazine in 1977, Ted Nugent claimed he had engaged in similar behavior to deliberately fail a physical exam in 1967 and be qualified 4-F (not acceptable for military service): Interviewer: How did you get out of the draft? Ted Nugent: Ted was a young boy, appearing to be a hippie but quite opposite in fact, working hard and playing hard, playing rock and roll like a deviant. People would question my sanity, I played so much. So I got my notice to be in the draft. Do you think I was gonna lay down my guitar and go play army? Give me a break! I was busy doin’ it to it. I had a career Jack. If I was walkin’ around, hippying down, getting’ loaded and pickin’ my ass like your common curs, I’d say “Hey yeah, go in the army. Beats the poop out of scuffin’ around in the gutters.” But I wasn’t a gutter dog. I was a hard workin’, mother****in’ rock and roll musician. I got my physical notice 30 days prior to. Well, on that day I ceased cleansing my body. No more brushing my teeth, no more washing my hair, no baths, no soap, no water. Thirty days of debris build. I stopped shavin’ and I was 18, had a little scraggly beard, really looked like a hippie. I had long hair, and it started gettin’ kinky, matted up. Then two weeks before, I stopped eating any food with nutritional value. I just had chips, Pepsi, beer-stuff I never touched-buttered poop, little jars of Polish sausages, and I’d drink the syrup, I was this side of death, Then a week before, I stopped going to the bathroom. I did it in my pants. poop, piss the whole shot. My pants got crusted up. See, I approached the whole thing like, Ted Nugent, cool hard-workin’ dude, is gonna wreak havoc on these imbeciles in the armed forces. I’m gonna play their own game, and I’m gonna destroy ’em. Now my whole body is crusted in poop and piss. I was ill. And three or four days before, I started stayin’ awake. I was close to death, but I was in control. I was extremely antidrug as I’ve always been, but I snorted some crystal methedrine. Talk about one wounded motherf*cker. A guy put up four lines, and it was for all four of us, but I didn’t know and I’m vacuuming that poop right up. I was a walking, talking hunk of human poop. I was six-foot-three of sin. So the guys took me down to the physical, and my nerves, my emotions were distraught. I was not a good person. I was wounded. But as painful and nauseous as it was — ’cause I was really into bein’ clean and on the ball — I made gutter swine hippies look like football players. I was deviano. So I went in, and those guys in uniform couldn’t believe the smell. They were ridiculin’ me and pushin’ me around and I was cryin’, but all the time I was laughin’ to myself. When they stuck the needle in my arm for the blood test I passed out, and when I came to they were kicking me into the wall. Then they made everybody take off their pants, and I did, and this sergeant says, “Oh my God, put those back on! You f*cking swine you!” Then they had a urine test and I couldn’t piss, But my poop was just like ooze, man, so I poop in the cup and put it on the counter. I had poop on my hand and my arm. The guy almost puked. I was so proud. I knew I had these chumps beat. The last thing I remember was wakin’ up in the ear test booth and they were sweepin’ up. So I went home and cleaned up. They took a putty knife to me. I got the street rats out of my hair, ate some good steaks, beans, potatoes, cottage cheese, milk. A couple of days and I was ready to kick ass. And in the mail I got this big juicy 4-F. They’d call dead people before they’d call my ass. But you know the funny thing about it? I’d make an incredible army man. I’d be a colonel before you knew what hit you, and I’d have the baddest bunch of motherf*ckin’ killers you’d ever seen in my platoon. But I just wasn’t into it. I was too busy doin’ my own thing, you know? Questioned about that account some thirty years later (by which time Nugent was known as a staunch political conservative, a supporter of the Republican Party, and an advocate of hunting and gun ownership rights) in an interview with the UK’s Independent newspaper, Nugent disclaimed that previous account of his draft-evading activities as story he had made up and fed to a gullible High Times reporter and asserted that he actually had avoided the draft through the legitimate means of a student deferment: He has the rage, but he doesn’t have the war record. At 18, he was called up to serve in Vietnam. “In 1977 you gave an interview to High Times [the cannabis user’s journal of record] where you claimed you defecated in your clothes to avoid the draft.” “I never shit my pants to get out of the draft,” says Nugent, good-naturedly. “You also told them you took crystal meth before the medical — as a result of which, and I quote: ‘I got this big juicy 4F. '” “Unbelievable. Meth,” he replies, in a tone of deep sarcasm. “Yes, that’s my drug of choice. You’ve got to realise that these interviewers would arrive with glazed eyes and I would make stories up. I never did crystal meth. And I never pooped my pants.” “But you did dodge the draft.” “I had a 1Y [student deferment]. I enrolled at Oakland Community College.” “You said then that you wanted ‘to teach the stupid bastards in the military a lesson’. I’d have thought you’d have loved the army. Guns. Travel. Danger.” “Back then, I didn’t even understand what World War II was.” “So basically,” — I admit that I have, unaccountably, started to speak Nugent — “you didn’t want to get your Michigan ass blown off in Vietnam.” “Correct. I did not want to get my ass blown off in Vietnam.” Clearly, though, Ted Nugent didn’t make up the tale about his snorting crystal meth before his pre-induction physical as a one-off jape just to fool a High Times reporter, as he said the same thing in an interview with CREEM magazine: Q: “Are you still a hard case on drugs?” A: “Real hard. I have never done a drug in my life. I have never smoked a joint in my life. I took two tokes off a joint with the MC5 one night and almost gagged and thought it was stupid. And that’s it. I took two tokes off a joint once. I snorted one line of cocaine. And one line of crystal methedrine before my draft physical — but God, that was worth it because I wanted to see the look on the Sergeant’s face. That’s it for drugs.” An analysis of Ted Nugent’s Selective Service classification record doesn’t prove or disprove either version of the story. He did indeed receive a high school student deferment (1-S) in 1967 and then (as he stated) a college student deferment (2-S) in 1968. However, he was reclassified as “available for military service” (1-A) in 1969 and then subsequently rejected as a result of a physical examination and given a 1-Y classification. (The 1-Y classification denoted persons “qualified for service only in time of war or national emergency” and was generally assigned to registrants who had exhibited medical conditions that were limiting but not disabling.) After the 1-Y classification was eliminated by the Selective Service at the end of 1971, Nugent was reclassified as 4-F (“registrant not qualified for any military service”).
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8600
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Vietnamese hat seller turns to homemade face shields in virus fight.
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For nearly three decades, Quach My Linh has sold hats at Ba Chieu market in Vietnam’s bustling Ho Chi Minh City.
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true
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Health News
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But following a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the 42-year-old vendor has turned to making plastic face shields for frontline medical workers instead. “I was once a patient myself and I feel like my family owes doctors a lot”, said Linh, who received hospital treatment a few years ago for a blood-related illness. “I want to make these shields to keep them healthy. If they are healthy, then they can protect us”. Last week, Vietnam began a 15-day social distancing campaign to slow the spread of the virus that has seen most non-essential businesses shut, including Linh’s stall. There have been 241 reported cases of the coronavirus in Vietnam and no reported deaths, according to the health ministry. Aggressive contact tracing and a mass quarantine programme have helped keep that tally low. When the lockdown began, Linh assembled a group of family members, friends and fellow vendors to start making the face shields. They can be worn in addition to face masks to better protect medical workers from the tiny virus-carrying droplets released by infected patients. In just a few days, Linh and her gang of volunteers made almost 1,000 face shields, she said, and distributed them to at least three nearby hospitals. Linh said she had drawn on her experience as a hat vendor to line the shields with comfortable padding. She watched media reports of doctors in the United States and consulted a friend who works as a nurse there to perfect the design, she said. The finishing touch? A sticker, with an important message to Vietnam’s medical workers: “Fight Covid-19 disease”. “Keep believing, because we are always with you”. (This story is refiled to correct dateline)
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15651
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Delta has had the most animal deaths among U.S. carriers in the past five years
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Pet-death claim leaves out important details
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mixture
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Georgia, Public Safety, Transportation, Bloomberg.com,
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"A new tracking device available to pets being transported in the cargo hold was supposed to calm passengers about flying with Fido on Delta Air Lines. But coverage of gadget to monitor temperature and crate positioning also included some data that may have had the opposite effect. ""Delta has had the most animal deaths among U.S. carriers in the past five years, with 51, though it has had only 6 since 2013,"" according to a Bloomberg.com news report on March 31, 2015. Reaction on social media was less measured, at one point calling the Atlanta-based airline ""responsible"" for the most pet deaths on U.S. carriers. So PolitiFact Georgia decided to look at the statistics to see how Delta measures up when it comes to ferrying our furry friends. The U.S. Department of Transportation requires airlines to file ""animal incident"" reports regarding injuries or deaths to animals being flown in the cargo hold. The data is compiled into monthly reports that also include information such as arrival times and lost baggage. (As an aside, while the government requires reports on pet deaths, there is no similar requirement for any people who may perish during flights). PolitiFact Georgia reviewed annual tallies of the animal incidents for the past five years and found Bloomberg was correct on the numbers: Carrier 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 5-yr Total Alaska 4 4 1 8 3 20 American 6 5 6 1 3 21 American Eagle 1 0 0 0 0 1 Continental 6 3 0 0 0 9 Delta 16 19 10 2 4 51 Hawaiian 2 2 1 1 2 8 United 4 2 12 9 5 32 Total 39 35 30 21 17 142 But there is more to the data than just numbers. First, it’s important to recognize that some airlines accept pets only if they are small enough to fit in the cabin. Southwest Airlines, for instance, wouldn’t be on the list of cargo hold deaths because its policy does not allow for that kind of transport. And mergers in the industry will skew the numbers, too. Continental did not see zero animal deaths since 2011, for instance. It is just now part of United. It is also worth noting that when Delta saw the number of pet deaths increase in 2011, it carried far more pets than other airlines in part because of its broad route network. That year, the number of pets that were injured or died on Delta was less than 0.2 percent of those it carried, the airline said. Looking at it that way, it’s highly misleading to compare Delta with airlines such as Hawaiian. The smaller airline flies about a tenth of the miles that Delta does, yet in recent years has seen nearly as many animal deaths. Still, Delta was concerned about its increase and expanded its restrictions on certain pets. In particular, it stopped accepting snub-nosed pets such as bulldogs or Pekinese as checked items, since the animals have more difficulty breathing. As Bloomberg notes, the changes have helped dramatically reduce the number of animals that ran into trouble, with deaths down nearly 79 percent from 2011. Those numbers have fallen even as the sheer volume of animals it transports remains high. Delta flies tens of thousands of pets every year, out of the half a million that federal data show are in plane cargo holds. About a thousand Delta flights take off out of Atlanta every day alone. ""We can’t say that every flight had pets on it. We can say that even one death is unacceptable,"" said Delta spokesman Morgan Durrant. ""Every pet is important to us. We wouldn’t accept the animal if we didn’t feel confident about their safety."" Incident reports back up Delta’s confidence. The majority of injuries and deaths are not from crew mishandling of the animals or in-flight problems. Rather, reports show the animals panicked in the kennels and attempted to chew or scratch their way out. Some animals died in their attempts. The American Veterinary Medicine Association recommends that pet owners acclimate their dogs and cats to crates well before flights, to help minimize that level of stress on the animals. The organization does not recommend tranquilizers, since that can depress breathing and increase stress. Likewise, it agrees with airlines on restrictions on some short-snout dog breeds, given they are already susceptible to breathing problems, said Dr. Kendall Houlihan, the assistant director of the AVMA’s animal welfare division. The limitations can vary for every pet, considering underlying health conditions, age and other factors, she said. ""The most important thing is for owners to speak to veterinarian as early as possible before the trip,"" Houlihan said. ""Part of that discussion needs to be whether air travel is appropriate."" Many pet owners have already decided that air travel is right for their dogs and cats, and nearly a half million fly every year without incident. Bloomberg news said that Delta has had the most animal deaths of U.S. carriers in the last decade. The numbers back up that claim, but they miss many of the reasons why. As one of the nation’s largest carriers, Delta cannot be accurately compared to significantly smaller airlines who may have higher pet deaths per miles flown, a statistic unavailable from airlines or government data. Without that missing context, the claim is just about numbers. And the numbers are accurate but misleading."
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10566
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Study links ADHD medicine with better test scores
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A consortium of 19 hydropower companies and organizations said it will receive European Union funding of 18 million euros ($20 million) to research the green energy form’s role, as the 28-member bloc seeks to become carbon neutral by 2050.
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true
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The deal will be announced on Tuesday on the sidelines of the United Nations climate conference in Madrid, a day before the new European Commission lays out its “European Green Deal” policy to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent. The consortium includes EDF, Voith, and General Electric Hydro, as well as universities across Europe. Hydropower can serve as a giant battery, providing a store of energy to balance intermittent renewable energy sources. As big business grapples with reducing emissions, metal processors, such as Norsk Hydro are using hydropower to make products they can market as green. Some environmental campaigners have warned against any expansion of hydropower because of its impact on biodiversity and river systems. But many analysts say all solutions will be needed if the EU has any hope of neutralizing carbon emissions by the middle of the century with investment running to trillions of euros. Under the deal, the “XFLEX HYDRO project” will get funds to explore how hydropower can stabilize variable renewables such as wind and solar, the European Commission said in a statement. Some of the technologies the consortium will test include a battery-turbine hybrid to improve the integration of renewables in Europe’s electric grid.
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3419
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Teen accused of leaving newborn in dumpster cited for abuse.
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A teenager accused of abandoning her newborn baby in a building’s dumpster in Northern California in scorching heat was cited for child abuse and will be released to her parents after she leaves the hospital, police said Wednesday.
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true
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Police, Stockton, Health, Sacramento, General News, California, Child abuse, U.S. News
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Two people found the boy wrapped in a blanket inside a plastic bag Tuesday afternoon in Stockton, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Sacramento. Officers later found his 15-year-old mother while canvassing the apartment complex, but it’s unclear if she lives there, Stockton Police Department spokesman Officer Joseph Silva said. An apartment complex resident heard cries and notified the manager, who pulled the child from the building’s dumpster, Silva said. The boy, who weighed 6 pounds and 7 ounces (2.9 kilograms) and was 20 inches (51 centimeters) long, still had his umbilical cord and was taken to a hospital, where he was doing well Wednesday, Silva said. It’s unclear how long the child was in the dumpster, when temperatures in the area reached 102 degrees (39 Celsius). The dumpster was under a tree. The police department received several messages via social media asking how the child could be adopted, Silva said. “We refer those calls to Child Protective Services,” which is caring for the baby boy, Silva said. Apartment managers told KTXL-TV they spotted the teen mom walking into the complex Tuesday morning and did not recognize her as one of their renters. No one answered at the unit where she was found. No one living nearby could tell KTXL who lived there. Detectives are still trying to determine her connection to the building, Silva said. Silva called the resident and the building manager who found the boy heroes and said they probably prevented the newborn’s death. “If they did not spring into action so quickly, this incident could have become a tragedy,” he said. Resident Troy Cooper told the Stockton Record he was returning home from visiting a friend when he heard what sounded like a kitten and a baby crying at the same. Something told him to investigate, and it was then that he saw something moving inside the dumpster. Cooper was unable to get into the dumpster so he called on-site manager John Pedebone. “I tried to listen, and I saw the bag was moving,” Pedebone said. “My first thought was that it was probably a dog, but when I listened carefully, I could hear the baby.” Pedebone, who has four children, said that as a father he was left feeling saddened and confused but found comfort in knowing the baby is doing well. “Hopefully,” he said, “everything will be fine.” Pedebone didn’t immediately return a message from The Associated Press seeking comment.
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7161
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Quake near Canada border jolts Yukon, southeast Alaska.
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A major earthquake in northwest British Columbia shook up communities in nearby Alaska and Yukon Territory but caused no apparent damage.
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true
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Anchorage, Alaska, Science, Canada, Earthquakes, Yukon
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Kathryn Carl, a teacher in the Alaska village of Klukwan about 40 miles (64 kilometers) from the epicenter, said the magnitude 6.2 quake shook her awake at 4:30 a.m. Carl thought her 80-pound Karelian bear dog had jumped on the bed. “She was sitting there,” Carl said. “She knew about it before we did.” A series of aftershocks, including a magnitude 6.3 quake at 6:18 a.m., kept Carl from getting a restful night’s sleep. Students at Klukwan School, where Carl is head teacher, took the quake in stride. It wasn’t even the main topic of conversation. “They’re going fishing,” Carl said. “They’re getting ready for a hooligan trip.” Hooligan are a type of smelt. The first earthquake struck about 83 miles (134 kilometers) southwest of Whitehorse, Canada. Richard Graham, acting director of infrastructure and operations for the city of Whitehorse, said officials inspected major structures afterward. They found no damage but had to reset traffic lights because the quake knocked out power to parts of the Yukon capital. Jay Massie, manager of Atco Electric Yukon, said the first quake shut down one of three major Whitehorse substations and affected 8,000 customers. Power was almost restored when a shorter, magnitude 6.3 aftershock affected the station again. Power to most customers was restored within two hours. Massie was preparing to take his daughter to swimming lessons when the first quake hit. It started slow, built to a crescendo and woke up everyone in his home, he said. “It even woke up my teenage daughter, which is very hard to do,” he said. The quake was felt in Alaska’s capital, Juneau, about 134 miles (216 kilometers) to the south. It roused state Rep. Charisse Millett from her sleep and knocked plastic dishware off her counters. “I am wide awake and super tired now,” said the Anchorage Republican, who has experienced her share of earthquakes but is used to them being shorter. It’s not uncommon for an aftershock to be larger than the triggering quake, though normally the following quakes are smaller, U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist Amy Vaughan said. Other aftershocks ranged from magnitudes 2 to 5. Vaughan said the shallow initial quake had the potential to cause damage but the remote location dropped the chances of major problems. Juneau emergency programs manager Tom Mattice said he received no reports of damage. Rep. Scott Kawasaki, who said he sleeps in his Capitol office at least twice a week to get work done, also was jolted awake. The Fairbanks Democrat said he was trying to fall back asleep on the couch when the second quake hit. A video he posted on Twitter showed liquid shaking in an energy drink bottle on a table. He said he was reminded of the recent renovation of the Capitol, meant to fortify it against earthquakes. “I was thinking about all the construction work that went into the Capitol, specifically on seismic control,” he said. “So I’m glad the Capitol didn’t fall into the channel.” Jaimie Lawson, a 911 dispatcher with the Skagway Police Department, said the town 55 miles (89 kilometers) away from the quake did not receive reports of damage or injuries from the initial shaking. Computers slid around in the mobile home that houses police operations in the valley town of 800, she said, and it was the first earthquake she felt that forced her to stand up to get her bearings. Heath Scott, chief of police in Haines, about 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) southeast of the quake epicenter, said it shook a picture frame off his file cabinet. He saw no damage as he toured the city of 2,500. The geological survey website recorded hundreds of reports of people feeling the shaking.
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3378
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King County child dies of flu.
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Public health officials say a King County child died of complications from the flu earlier this month — the first known case of a pediatric flu-related death in the county since 2009.
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true
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Health, General News, Seattle, Flu, Public health
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The Seattle Times reports the child was elementary-school age and died in a Pierce County hospital Dec. 15, according to a statement from Public Health — Seattle & King County. Three King County adults also have died since the start of this flu season, which began unusually early and is especially affecting children, health officials said. Health Officer Dr. Jeff Duchin said the predominant strain circulating right now is the influenza B virus. Officials are urging people to get vaccinated. There are also anti-viral treatments available after flu-like symptoms appear, which can prevent people from getting sicker or developing complications, Duchin said. Duchin declined to say whether the child who died had been vaccinated but said each year, 80% to 90% of children who die from the flu were not vaccinated. Public Health estimates there are 70 to 500 flu-related deaths in King County each year. People who get the flu can be contagious a day before symptoms develop and up to a week after becoming sick, according to Public Health. Symptoms include fever, cough, weakness and body aches.
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8938
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Probiotics could help millions of patients suffering from bipolar disorder
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This news release focuses on a study of the gut microbiome, an emerging avenue of research. The release would have been better had it provided more detail about the study (including the number of patients involved) and the sizes of the beneficial effects. Instead, the release relies heavily on speculative language, suggesting a direct connection between gut inflammation or “microbial imbalances” and mood disorders. Despite a slew of recent studies, no causal relationship has been established between the microbiome and mental health. The microbiome, a compelling area of research, is sometimes presented in news releases and news stories as a new panacea for a wide range of health conditions. But what’s currently unknown in this area significantly outweighs what is known. Writing about this new field of research requires an emphasis on caveats. News releases should avoid implying causality (ie. “good bacteria” or “a balanced microbiome” is responsible for good outcomes), and highlight study limitations. As of 2018, and contrary to what this new release headline implies, probiotics have not been shown to help millions of patients suffering from any disease.
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false
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American College of Neuropsychophamacology,bipolar disorder,Probiotics
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Neither the cost, composition, or dosing of the intervention — a probiotic preparation of strains of a Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium — is provided. The release notes that the 6-month study yielded the following results: The group randomized to receive the probiotic, on average, “didn’t return to hospital as quickly … required less in-patient treatment time … [and the] beneficial effects were most pronounced in those patients who exhibited abnormally high levels of inflammation” when compared to the placebo group. However no data are provided to support these outcomes. The news release should have included information about the number of patients in the trial, the schedule of probiotic dosing given to the participants, the changes in inflammation levels, the difference in number of rehospitalizations, and other details. The release also includes some other unsubstantiated claims, such as: The release doesn’t mention any potential harms of probiotics nor the fact that they are not regulated for safety and effectiveness. The release doesn’t describe the study parameters. According to the abstract, it was a double-blind randomized comparison of 33 people on probiotics after discharge for a manic episode, and 33 patients who took placebo. The study had some limitations that should have been mentioned in the release. First, the drop-out was high with only 79% (n=52) of the original group completing the 6-month follow-up. Second, all the subjects continued to take their usual medications and these were not standardized. Therefore, some of the differences noted could be attributed to medications, not the intervention. Finally, no conclusions regarding the role of “inflammation” in modulating behavior can be drawn since inflammatory measurements were not taken in the gut or the cerebrospinal fluid. The release doesn’t engage in disease mongering. It provides context on the prevalence of bipolar disorder in the US. Funding is not mentioned. A version of the study published in April 2018 noted that the lead author had no conflicts of interest to disclose. The news release mentions the standard treatments for bipolar disorder: “Currently, the standard treatment (of bipolar illness) includes a combination of psychotherapy and prescription medications such as mood stabilizers and antipsychotics.” The dosage and composition of the probiotic mixture used in this study are not clarified. Therefore, readers have no idea if just any probiotic will do. This is worrisome since some readers — particularly those with bipolar illness — may extrapolate from the news release headline and start self-medicating based on these preliminary findings that don’t prove probiotics help bipolar illness. While the use of probiotics to treat bipolar disorder is part of an “an emerging field of research” and therefore novel, it hasn’t been established through this or other research as an effective intervention. The release implies that the study builds on previous research in this area. In that case, it would have been helpful for the news release to disclose those aspects of the study had been previously published. Along with the unsubstantiated headline suggesting “millions” of people who suffer with bipolar disease could be helped by probiotics, the release employs the pseudoscientific term “gut-brain axis” to suggest there are known connections between good and bad bacteria, microbial balance, and psychiatric mood disorders. But without data, much of the language used throughout the news release is unjustified.
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9494
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Two big studies bolster the claim that coffee – even decaf – is good for you
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This Los Angeles Times story was one of many news outlets to report on a pair of large epidemiological studies on coffee-drinking and mortality. And like many of those other stories, this piece seems to assume that coffee really is healthy, although that is not proven by these or any other observational (association) studies. We think the helpful notes of caution included in the story may get drowned out by the optimistic framing of the headline and lead paragraph. Describing coffee as “good for you” suggests to readers that coffee causes health benefits — not something that these studies were designed to evaluate. We also explored the problems with news coverage about this study in a blog post. As the article states, “2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed” each day around the world. Coffee is widely consumed and many people drink multiple cups per day. The potential health benefits and risks of coffee, like its consumption cousins wine and chocolate, seem to always be of interest to health news readers. And yet, like so many previous studies, these describe an association, not a causal effect. This particular article did not claim that coffee helps you live longer, but it also did not make crystal clear that the associations found in the studies do not really tell us much about whether coffee does anything at all with regard to chronic disease or mortality.
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true
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coffee
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There’s little need to discuss costs of a substance as well known as coffee. The story does a good job of describing groups for comparison: coffee-abstainers, light drinkers (1-6 cups per week), and heavier drinkers (>2 cups per day). However death rates were presented as relative risk. How many of the 18,000-plus subject died during the average 16 years they were followed? What does “18% less likely to have died” look like in absolute numbers? Coffee does have adverse effects, such as insomnia, increasing anxiety, and triggering reflux in certain people. However, the story made no mention of coffee’s downsides. The story makes clear how large the study was, what the methodology was, and that other big risk factors for early death such as smoking were taken into account. Also, the story makes clear that no one is recommending coffee-drinking as a mode to prevent chronic diseases that lead to early death. And it includes a clear caution regarding the limitations of observational studies: “Though the two studies involved hundreds of thousands of people, they weren’t designed to show that drinking more coffee caused people to live longer; that would require a randomized trial.” And yet, it’s important for journalists to avoid language that undercuts this important message. The headline, suggesting that coffee is “good for you” makes a clear cause-and-effect leap. And the use of a hedge like “might” in the following sentence isn’t enough to offset the clear cause-and-effect implication — i.e. that coffee is responsible for “extending” your life. “The best thing about your coffee habit might be that it extends your life by reducing your risk of death from heart disease, diabetes or even cancer.” We’ll rate this a very marginal Satisfactory with room for improvement. Coverage at the BBC, for example, was more successful at capturing the nuances of observational evidence, starting with the headline: “Coffee drinkers live longer – perhaps.” No fear-mongering here. The story includes perspective from an editorial that accompanied the studies in the journal, the Annals of Internal Medicine. And that’s enough for a satisfactory grade. Reaching out to more sources, and actually talking to experts in this field, might have turned up additional insights worth sharing with readers. The story makes clear that the claims of benefit — reduced mortality — are not a reason to drink coffee. Instead the findings suggest there are no long-term effects that should scare coffee-drinkers away from their habit. In any case, the situation does not call for a comparison with alternative methods of living longer. We’ll rate this Not Applicable. Coffee is so widely available that there’s no need to make the point. The story makes clear how the National Cancer Institute study extends previous research on coffee’s health effects from studies of mostly white European-descent subjects to a multi-ethnic population. The story does not appear to rely on a news release.
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2229
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Scientists solve the mystery of the dragon with transparent teeth.
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Dwelling in the dark ocean depths, the dragonfish is a frightful marvel that would fit nicely into any horror movie, boasting exotic adaptations such as virtually transparent fangs that help it thrive in this extreme environment.
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true
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Science News
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The nature of these see-through teeth had been a mystery, until now. Scientists on Wednesday described what makes these teeth so clear, saying they are made of the same basic material as human teeth but that it has been dramatically reorganized. The researchers studied the dragonfish species called Aristostomias scintillans, caught at depths up to about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) in the Pacific Ocean off California’s coast. This pencil-sized species reaches 10 inches (25 cm) long, but possessing plenty of sci-fi monster qualities despite its small size. It has a black, elongated, eel-like body, with a long, fleshy filament called a barbel hanging from its lower jaw with a bioluminescent organ called a photophore on the end to lure prey. It also has two rows of photophores along the length of its body. Its long, sharp teeth are big relative to its body size. Its face looks like the creatures from the “Alien” movies, and it has a similarly vicious disposition. Its teeth, like ours, are made up of an outer layer of enamel and an inner layer of hard, dense, bony tissue called dentin. But there is a twist. The enamel consists of nanoscale crystals embedded in the surrounding structure. The dentine consists of nanoscale fibers of the protein called collagen coated with a crystalline form of a mineral called hydroxyapatite, common in bones and teeth. These traits prevent any light existing in the near blackness from reflecting off the tooth surface, adding stealth to its hunt for other fish and shrimp. “Thus, the mouth is invisible and the prey is caught more easily,” said materials scientist Marc Andre Meyers of the University of California, San Diego, who led the research published in the journal Matter. “Initially, we thought the teeth were made of another, unknown material,” Meyers said. “However, we discovered that they are made of the same materials as our human teeth: hydroxyapatite and collagen. However, their organization is significantly different from that of other fish and mammals. This was a surprise for us: same building blocks, different scales and hierarchies. Nature is amazing in its ingeniosity.” A small number of other fish such as the anglerfish and hatchetfish have transparent teeth. “These have not been investigated yet, but I suspect they have a similar structure,” Meyers said.
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33249
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Schoolkids are smoking and injecting crushed bedbugs to get high from a hallucinogenic substance they contain.
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The “crushed bedbugs” item has now entered the pantheon of bogus alarmist warnings about fictitiously bizarre things that kids supposedly do to get inexpensive highs, such as shamboiling (i.e., inhaling boiled shampoo fumes), jenkem (i.e., inhaling fermented raw sewage), and shooting up with Pantene brand shampoo.
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false
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Horrors, ASP Article, bedbugs, getting high
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April 2014 saw the proliferation of Internet accounts, based on a purported local television news spot from Phoenix station KNXV, reporting the latest alleged shocking schoolyard trend: kids smoking or injecting crushed bedbugs to get a cheap high from a hallucinogenic substance (PH-417) supposedly contained within those critters: Kids smoking BED BUGS to get high, talk about terrifying tween trend! In their latest effort to find a cheap high that doesn’t require the purchase of any actual drugs, teens have discovered a way to smoke bed bugs. Yes, BED BUGS. The things that normal people hate even thinking about. The little critters that plague hotels and give guests nasty rashes. Yes, those very same bed bugs. Apparently, the insects contain a hallucinogenic substance within them, except it’s impossible to isolate it, so the bugs have to be caught, killed and crushed into a powder, which is then either smoked or, perhaps even worse and more disgusting, injected. How did they even think of this?! Unfortunately, not only is the very idea of this cringe-worthy, but the bugs also contain other elements that can cause serious damage to the mind and body, so smoking them can be extremely dangerous. Like you didn’t already know that. However, this story was just a hoax, an April Fool’s Day prank based on an altered version of a real KNXV-TV report from several months earlier on the dangers of “dabbing” (i.e., inhaling butane-extracted hash oil, also known as BHO): If you’re involved with cannabis at all, whether recreationally, medically, or from a business standpoint, then you either know about or have probably heard of “dabbing.” This method of consumption has been around for at least a decade, but the advent of more advanced extraction methods have led to a flood of cannabis concentrates that have boosted dabbing’s popularity. Dabs are doses of cannabis concentrates that used to mostly refer to butane hash oil (or BHO), but has grown to include a variety of other concentrates such as wax, shatter, budder, or even “errl,” which is a playful meme-derived way of saying oil. These concentrates can be up to 80% THC, the active psychoactive compound in cannabis, but usually range between 50 and 75%. A dab usually refers to a dose of concentrate that is heated on a hot surface, usually a nail, and then inhaled. Shane Watson, the interview subject featured in both the hoax “bedbug” video and the original KNXV news report on “dabbing,” posted his own clip to YouTube to explain that he had nothing to do with the former, and that the latter misrepresented his involvement with the issue:
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37513
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Those $1200 coronavirus/COVID-19 stimulus payments aren't a grant from the government, they're an advance on your 2020 tax refund or a loan you'll have to repay the IRS.
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Is a $1,200 Coronavirus Stimulus an Advance on 2020’s Tax Credit — or a Loan You Have to Pay Back in 2021?
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unproven
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Fact Checks, Viral Content
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In the early evening of March 27 2020, news that Americans would receive COVID-19 stimulus checks of $1,200 or higher was a flashpoint of discussion in the reporting of the passage of the the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, also called the CARES Act.Initial reporting often focused on attendant “stimulus” payments purportedly marked for disbursements to Americans in varying amounts depending on their circumstances. Individual taxpayers over a certain age were said to be eligible for $1,200, and married taxpayers might receive $3,400; a clause involved individual payments of $500 per child under the age of 17:Most adults will get $1,200, although some would get less. For every qualifying child age 16 or under, the payment will be an additional $500.Many Americans obtained information about the stimulus payments through hastily authored “explainers,” “FAQs,” and 2020 stimulus check calculators across the web in the hours after the bill passed. And even before any legislation was voted on, the amounts of the one-time payments were flagged as insufficient to bolster the average American facing the economic fallout of widely-observed social distancing and quarantine measures for even a month.However, news about the $1,200 payments led to another broadly spreading claim — that the American government was not, as it seemed to indicate, supplying the funds itself, but instead simply advancing taxpayers a share of their own anticipated 2021 tax refund:“Remember: The money is likely an advance. IT IS A LOAN. Functionally this is the same as the Bush Stimulus Plan of 2008 and that money, YOUR MONEY, will come out of your future tax refund. Don’t fall all over yourselves being grateful. It’s a fucking scam designed to pacify you.”“So, all that money coming our way isn’t really anything we can spend. It’s actually an advance on a tax credit for next year and we may have to pay it back. Lovely. Another ‘give away’ that gives nothing to people who need it but bails out the big corporations yet again. I’m really tired of this shit.”“Before you get excited about the $1,000 stimulus package being discussed, please remember that when Bush gave that stimulus, it was a deduction from your tax refund in the next year. So if they structure it the same way (which they will), you will pay that money back when you file your 2020 taxes in 2021. I remember having client after client upset because their refunds were lower due to having to deduct that stimulus from the bottom line. It’s not free money. It’s an advance on your 2020 tax refund. Look at your refund this year. Subtract $1,000…that will be your refund next year. Do you owe this year? Add $1,000 to the amount you owe and that’s what you will owe next year.”On Twitter, similar claims followed news of the stimulus checks, which again often involved some wiggle room about whether or not tax refunds would be reduced by the amount of their stimulus credit:Stimulus bill doesn’t give anyone free $$$… it prepays you next year’s tax refund“Technically, the checks are advances of refundable credits. Treasury will advance your check based on your most recently filed tax return (2018 or 2019 tax return)” https://t.co/FixaNEfAFY— Anna Giaritelli (@Anna_Giaritelli) March 26, 2020Uhhhhh. I just learned that the stimulus checks we are getting are just an advance on our 2020 taxes. If you get a $1200 stimulus check, and traditionally get a tax refund of $800, you will owe the government $400 for 2020 instead.— Cameron (@SolomeOU) March 30, 2020It is a totally new credit that will appear on your 2020 refund, that was not there in 2019, that is being paid in advance, so it would not affect your normal return amount so long as your income does not change to the point that it pushes you out of the stimulus bracket.— Arkady Bogdanov (@Tectomancer) March 29, 2020This stimulus check is an ADVANCE of a 2020 tax refund? The fuck kind of shit are we really trying to do here?#StimulusPackage2020— 📷𝕊𝕪𝕟Δ𝕖𝕤𝕥Δ𝕥𝕚𝕔 🏳️🌈 (@synaestatic) March 28, 2020Other tweets were less “if” and “likely” reliant:The govt is not giving you money; its an advance on the tax refund you would be expecting. Next year, if you file and you’re supposed to get a refund for $2,500, the tax form would have a line where you list the stimulus payout you received in 2020. https://t.co/EwRbGHlrSC— scott immordino (@ScottImmordino) March 23, 2020Don't Spend Those Stimulus Checks put them in the Bank. They are just an advance on your Next Refund. If your Refund is less than $1200, You will have to pay the Difference back. This is a Scam. Mine is going in the Bank. Sorry Economy.— Michael Varvel (@MichaelVarvel) March 25, 2020If anything was certain, it was that Americans out of work and relying on a lifeline from the government didn’t know if what was described as a windfall would, in fact, place them even further behind financially when tax season rolled around in 2021.A blog post circulating on Twitter explicitly claimed that the money was not a bonus, but instead drawn against any possible refund to taxpayers for 2020 in 2021:The McConnell proposal calls for giving Americans that money as an advance on a future tax refund.In other words, this is not a giveaway, or socialism, or some act of generosity.The government is not giving you money; it is giving you an advance on the tax refund you would be expecting in 2021.For example, say you’re a married couple with no children and you receive a check for $2,400 now. Next year, if you’ do your taxes and you’re supposed to get a refund for $2,500, the tax form would have a line where you list the stimulus payout you received in 2020. The IRS would deduct that $2,400 and give you the net difference of $100 as your 2020 refund check.This is also how the process worked as part of the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, although the advances then were $300 for individuals or $600 for couples.The government could choose to issue the payments as a gift, but even gifts come with strings attached. The checks would be considered taxable income and recipients would owe taxes when filing their 2020 tax returns. For a married couple with two children (receiving a $3,400 gift), would incur a tax hit of nearly $750 if their household income was $80,000.On March 25 2020, the same blogger reiterated that the money would be drawn against refunds paid out in 2021:The proposed legislation would issue payouts of $1,200 to individuals, $2,400 to married couples and $500 per dependent child. The Republicans conceded to Democratic demands that the payments not be income-based and not phase-out for low or higher earners … The CARES Act calls for giving Americans money as an advance on a future tax refund.In other words, this is not a free-money giveaway, or socialism run wild, or some act of generosity on the part of those controlling the purse in Washington.The government is not giving you money, no matter how badly you are hurting financially.The government is giving you an advance on the tax refund you would be expecting in 2021.For example, say you’re a married couple with one child, and you receive a check for $2,900 now ($1,200 each and $500 for child).Next year, when it comes time to do your taxes, and you’re supposed to get a refund for $3,500, the tax form would have a line where you list the stimulus payout you received in 2020.The $2,900 advance would be deducted from your expected refund, leaving a net refund of $600.This is the way the payments in the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 were also handled … Americans will get checks now (or, electronic deposits) and come next spring will get a gut-punch when they do their taxes and realize most are not getting a refund in 2021…because they already got it in April of 2020.The precise nature (and liability) of the coronavirus stimulus as an “advance” was a matter of particular concern for a contingent of Americans who rely on their annual tax refund to make ends meet for the rest of the year. In 2015, The Atlantic reported that “a majority of Americans [eligible for refunds] plan to use their refunds to pay off debt or cover basic necessities” — speaking to several taxpayers whose refunds were already earmarked for medical bills or housing by the time they arrived:Adults over the age of 40 without a college degree were the most likely group to use their refund to pay for necessities. Barbara Thomas, 58 from Irrigon, Ore., already spent her tax refund on medical bills from a recent surgery to remove cancerous melanoma. Thomas works seasonally in the fishing industry and over the winter, she and her husband have tried to stretch his retirement income to cover both their regular expenses and her doctor’s appointments. Anything extra that comes their way–whether her refund or fuel savings–makes all the difference.“It just makes it a lot easier to make ends meet,” Thomas said. “Living on social security is tough.”In early March 2020, Marketplace reported that most of the taxpayers getting refunds indicated an inability to survive financially without that money — a pattern of relief disrupted by changes to the tax code in 2017:Every year, the tax refund was spent before it arrived. Chris MarkerMorse and his wife, both teachers in high-need public schools in California, knew they’d use it to pay off credit card debt they racked up buying supplies for their classrooms, their students, their schools.“We spent quite a lot of money on that each year,” he said. “We’d put it on a credit card, get points, and then we’d use our tax refund to pay down that credit card.”They relied on it. A lot of people do. A majority of Americans, in fact, who get refunds. Sixty-eight percent of those who expect a refund in any given year say it’s important to their financial well-being, according to a survey out Wednesday from CreditCards.com. A third say it’s very important.“That’s not surprising,” said Mark Mazur, the director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “If you think that the average income tax refund approaches $3,000, that could be one month’s worth of income for a moderate-income household. So, not surprising that it’s a significant fraction of their cash flow for the year.”The refund landscape has changed for low- and middle-income families, though, since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 went into effect. Many Americans saw their tax refunds drop last year, some significantly, whether because the withholding tables changed and they got more in their paycheck throughout the year, or in some cases because their taxes went up. In both instances, there were a lot of people who got hit hard.One Forbes contributor blogged some questions and answers, assuring readers that taxpayers “won’t lose out” on their anticipated 2020 tax year refund in 2021:A refundable credit means that you can take advantage of the credit even if you do not owe any tax. Unlike with a nonrefundable credit, if you don’t have any tax liability, the “extra” credit is not lost but is instead refunded to you.In this case, the stimulus check acts like a refund that you get in advance based on your 2020 income. That’s confusing because you don’t know how much you’re going to earn in 2020, but it’s why the IRS is using earlier returns. But this advance payment on the credit does not affect your “normal” tax refund for 2020: you won’t lose out on your expected tax refund for 2020 with the check.A different contributor on Forbes’ platform also attempted to determine the source of the money, making what looked like a conflicting claim — that taxpayers who received “too much” coronavirus stimulus money would be on the hook in 2021:The stimulus is an advance of a refundable tax credit on your 2020 taxes.In other words, the bill created a refundable tax credit and the IRS is paying out the amount of that tax credit to eligible taxpayer now. Since the IRS does not have your 2020 tax year information, it will use a previous year’s information to calculate the amount.This is a tax credit so it is not considered taxable income for 2020.If the IRS gives you too much of a stimulus check, you could be asked to pay back the difference but not until you file your return on April 15, 2021. You will not be assessed interest on the over-payment amount. If the IRS pays you too little, you’ll get the difference added to your tax refund next year.An undated blog post on the Tax Act blog described also the payments as an advance:Technically, the [coronavirus stimulus] money is an advance of a refundable credit on your 2020 return. A refundable credit is a tax benefit you can take advantage of even if you do not owe any tax. If you qualify to claim it, any money that isn’t needed to pay down your tax liability is refunded to you. Basically, the stimulus payments are advance refunds based on your 2020 income.If you’re confused, that’s understandable; it is confusing. Obviously, no one can be sure how much you’re going to earn in 2020. That’s why the IRS is basing how much you’re due off prior year tax returns. When you file your 2020 return, the IRS will compare what you received this year for the credit with what you qualify for based on your 2020 income.If you should have received a payment and didn’t, or if you should have received more than you did, you will receive additional money. If the numbers on your 2020 tax return suggest you got more than you should have, you won’t have to pay it back. Considering most people’s incomes don’t flucutate too much from year to year, most everyone should receive the right amount the first go-around.In an above-linked explainer, the New York Times reported that the coronavirus-related stimulus included a $500 bonus for “every qualifying child age 16 or under” in a qualifying taxpayer’s family. That particular detail stood out — the previous month, in February 2020, USA Today‘s reporting on the Earned Income Tax Credit addressed qualifying children in a given tax year.That article (“Millions of Americans are missing out on Earned Income Tax Credit”) included tax code information which was possibly pertinent in determining where the “advance on a tax refund” aspect came in:How do I know whether my child would qualify?Among other requirements, the child must be under age 19 at the end of the year and younger than you or your spouse, if you file a joint return.Or the child can be a full-time student in at least five months of the year and under age 24 at the end of the year and younger than you or your spouse, if you file a joint return.Per the IRS and regarding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), any qualifying child was required to be under the age of 19 at the end of the tax year — which in this case is 2019.The CARES Act and the coronavirus stimulus checks were intended for distribution in April or May 2020 — and it requires qualifying children to be under the age of 17. A dependent born on July 15 2003 would be 16 at the end of 2019, thus qualifying for the EITC in that tax year. But that same child would be 18 in 2021, not qualifying for the EITC in the 2020 tax year or on 2021’s return.It seems possible that the CARES act shaved two years from the age of qualifying youths because parents who received the EITC in 2019 and saw it reflected in any 2020 refund on taxes would not, in fact, see the same tax credit in a 2021 refund on 2020’s taxes. In other words, revising the eligible age of dependents downward hinted at the potential relevance of 2020 tax year filings in 2021.A March 28 2020 article on business advice and news site Kiplinger.com (“Will You Get a Bigger Stimulus Check by Waiting to File Your Tax Return?” via Nasdaq.com) noted that taxpayers who hadn’t filed taxes in 2020 for 2019 could conceivably delay filing so that the IRS would use their 2018 return instead — possibly providing them a higher stimulus check based on those earlier earnings. But uncertainty about overpayments creating tax debt pointed to possibly yet-undecided functions of the payment:Back in 2008, when we had a similar stimulus check program, there was no mechanism for paying back any “extra” stimulus check money. The IRS hasn’t said yet if they’ll repeat that approach this time around, but we’re keeping an eye out for guidance addressing the situation. Stay tuned!In reporting on the nature of the stimulus payments, all roads led back to IRS guidance issued to taxpayers on EITC, refunds, dependents, and other tax liabilities or offsets. The IRS maintained a “Coronavirus Tax Relief” page, which was absolutely no clearer than any speculative articles or social media posts.This is what it looked like as of March 30 2020:A large yellow “!” message at the top of the page implored confused taxpayers not to call to ask the IRS about the coronavirus stimulus checks:Stimulus payment checks: No information available yet, No sign-up needed Instead of calling, please check back for updates.Three days after the bill’s March 27 2020 passage, a subsequent portion read:Stimulus payment checks: No information available yet, No sign-up needed At this time, the IRS does not have any information available yet regarding stimulus or payment checks, which remain under consideration in Congress. Please do not call the IRS about this. When the IRS has more specific details available, we will make it available on this page.On March 29 2020, the verified Twitter account @IRSNews tweeted the same link, but the IRS has still not answered any questions about whether the stimulus checks were coming out of 2021 tax refunds:@USTreasury and #IRS issue guidance on delaying tax payments due to the #COVID19 outbreak. If you don’t have a tax balance due, file as quickly as possible to get your refund. See: https://t.co/hEEWmgHA9V— IRS (@IRSnews) March 29, 2020On the 26th and 27th, the IRS again urged taxpayers not to call to ask about their coronavirus stimulus checks, and offered no guidance about whether the payments would be deducted from any anticipated 2020 refund in 2021. The account also tagged media personalities, encouraging them to spread the word about the IRS not having any information about the payments:Looking for information on stimulus payment checks? As soon as it becomes available, #IRS will share it on https://t.co/hEEWmgHA9V pic.twitter.com/GatbZDi1vg— IRS (@IRSnews) March 27, 2020@AliVelshi @MSNBC @NBCNews spread the word: There’s no reason to call #IRS about stimulus payments. If you haven’t filed, https://t.co/kcgZUfN9B4 can help including w/ #IRSFreeFile options. For accurate & up to date info on #COVID19 relief see https://t.co/hEEWmgHA9V Details soon— IRS (@IRSnews) March 27, 2020#IRS does not have information available yet on stimulus payments. There’s no need to call or sign up for anything. Watch for updates to https://t.co/hEEWmgHA9V pic.twitter.com/3Jm6UhMbFv— IRS (@IRSnews) March 26, 2020One of the two Forbes contributor advised readers with additional questions to visit the March 25 2020 Congressional Record [PDF], a 147-page long document with no obvious additional information about the source of the coronavirus stimulus checks. It included significant transcribed bickering between elected officials, but very little in terms of meaningful information about whether the $1,200 was coming from Americans’ 2020 tax year refunds or somewhere else.On pages 63 and 64 of that document, a section addressed “recovery rebates for individuals,” which referenced US Code. It indicated the payments as proposed on March 25 2020 were “a credit against the tax imposed” under federal tax code:SEC. 6428. 2020 RECOVERY REBATES FOR INDIVIDUALS. “(a) IN GENERAL.—In the case of an eligible individual, there shall be allowed as a credit against the tax imposed by subtitle A for the first taxable year beginning in 2020 an amount equal to the sum of— [$1,200, $2,400, and $500 for qualifying dependents]“(e) COORDINATION WITH ADVANCE REFUNDS OF CREDIT.— “(1) IN GENERAL.—The amount of credit which would (but for this paragraph) be allowable under this section shall be reduced (but not below zero) by the aggregate refunds and credits made or allowed to the taxpayer under subsection (f). Any failure to so reduce the credit shall be treated as arising out of a mathematical or clerical error and assessed according to section 6213(b)(1). […]“(1) IN GENERAL.—Subject to paragraph (5), each individual who was an eligible individual for such individual’s first taxable year beginning in 2019 shall be treated as having made a payment against the tax imposed by chapter 1 for such taxable year in an amount equal to the advance refund amount for such taxable year. “(2) ADVANCE REFUND AMOUNT.—For purposes of paragraph (1), the advance refund amount is the amount that would have been allowed as a credit under this section for such taxable year if this section (other than subsection (e) and this subsection) had applied to such taxable year.It appeared the referenced tax code was U.S. Code 26, Subtitle A: Income Taxes — essentially, the portion of the code establishing and structuring the payment of income tax — but the excerpted portion didn’t really clarify what effect the credit might have on tax returns in 2021 (for income tax paid in 2020. )GovTrack.us provided the full text of H.R. 748: Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (or the CARES ACT) as of March 28 2020. Under “TITLE II—Assistance for American Workers, Families, and Businesses,” “Subtitle B—Rebates and other individual provisions,” was “Sec. 2201. 2020 recovery rebates for individuals,” which very closely matched the portion excerpted from the March 25 2020 Congressional Record above.Section (F), subsections (1) and (2) held:(f)Advance refunds and credits (1)In general Subject to paragraph (5), each individual who was an eligible individual for such individual’s first taxable year beginning in 2019 shall be treated as having made a payment against the tax imposed by chapter 1 for such taxable year in an amount equal to the advance refund amount for such taxable year. (2)Advance refund amount For purposes of paragraph (1), the advance refund amount is the amount that would have been allowed as a credit under this section for such taxable year if this section (other than subsection (e) and this subsection) had applied to such taxable year.Section (F), subsection (4) made reference to interest on overpayment, which suggested that the amount of the credits would be in some way relevant to 2020 tax returns filed in 2021:No interest shall be allowed on any overpayment attributable to this section.Unfortunately, language of the bill was not very clear on whether coronavirus stimulus checks distributed via the IRS would be deducted from anticipated 2021 refunds for the 2020 tax year. Explainers and FAQs focused primarily on who would receive which amount, but were light on any reference to what effects, if any, the stimulus payments might have on future tax refunds. In the bill, text says “each individual who was an eligible individual for such individual’s first taxable year beginning in 2019 shall be treated as having made a payment against the tax imposed by chapter 1 for such taxable year in an amount equal to the advance refund amount for such taxable year, and they were described as an “advance refund.”Although questions were supposed to be directed to the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS repeatedly said across channels and its site that it “does not have any information available yet regarding stimulus or payment checks, which remain under consideration in Congress.” And while some reporting said no “overpayment” would result in future tax liability, other assessments indicated incorrect payments could result in April 2021 tax liability — albeit, maybe, without interest.Update, April 15 2020: For additional information on the current status of coronavirus stimulus payments, or if your deposit has not arrived, please visit:Where is My Stimulus? How to Get Your Missing IRS Coronavirus Check
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3380
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Missouri agency requests state money to fight fatal disease.
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A Missouri agency has asked the state for more funding to combat Legionnaires’ disease, a severe form of pneumonia that has sickened more than 800 people in the state over the last five years.
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true
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Health, Michael Brown, General News, Public health, State budgets
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The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services said the state’s response to the disease has grown and that current state laboratory staff are unable to complete all duties, according to documents submitted to state budget officials. As of July, 812 people in the state had contracted Legionnaires’ since 2014 and 44 had died, according to the health department. Missouri officials requested funding for a lab scientist and want the state to hire two environmental public health specialists and one epidemiology specialist, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. They would handle fieldwork duties and an influx of Legionella testing samples. The budget line would cost $320,057, which includes travel, training and other expenses, the department said. The DHSS’s request is based partly from new federal guidelines that requires individuals diagnosed with Legionnaires’ be questioned about visits to facilities and public venues 14 days prior to their illness, instead of the current 10-day time frame. The new rule “will substantially grow the staff time that will be dedicated to assessment and investigation,” the DHSS said, adding that existing staff had collected 500 Legionella samples and conducted 60 field inspections of implicated facilities this year. “However, DHSS has no dedicated staff to conduct the environmental health activities tied to Legionnaires’ Disease cases,” the department noted. “As the rigor and intensity associated with Legionella response has grown, existing staff have absorbed more duties.” New testing capabilities introduced in June for potable and non-potable water, and other environmental samples, have led to a surge in testing samples, the department said. “Subsequent to making this testing capability available, the demand for testing has increased well beyond projections,” the budget request said. The State Public Health Laboratory “is unable to provide the necessary Legionella testing to support significant public health investigations in Missouri on an ongoing basis.”
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34545
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"A ""daith piercing"" can cure migraine headaches."
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In short, acupuncture itself is a scientifically questionable therapy even when administered by protocol; daith piercings as an acupuncture proxy goes several steps further into the territory of shaky folk medicine. Like acupuncture, daith piercings are unlikely to hurt or harm most patients. However, cartilage piercings are uncomfortable to painful to receive and would likely be considered unsightly or undesirable by the vast majority of sufferers who stand to benefit from the purported treatment.
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unproven
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Medical, acupuncture, alternative medicine, daith piercings
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As many as one in five Americans suffers from chronic migraine headaches, an episodic condition exacerbated by a lack of consistent treatment options. Many migraine sufferers struggle to avoid known triggers but inevitably experience periodic (and crippling) episodes. Perhaps owing to the hit-and-miss nature of migraine treatment, anecdotal claims about preventing, alleviating, or even stopping migraines altogether abound online. In mid-2015, sufferers began spreading an article that maintained a specific kind of ear piercing (known as a “daith piercing”) could alleviate migraines. The article was published by a student-run web site at State University of New York (SUNY) Purchase and titled “A ‘Piercing’ New Alternative for Migraine Relief”: With an open mind these [migraine treatment] alternatives are capable of being the answer, and there is a new one on the market, which is simple, inexpensive, and doubles as a piece of jewelry. The daith piercing is a small ring that pierces the inner cartilage of either ear, running through a pressure point, which for some will relive migraine pain. It is a relatively new procedure, mainly preformed at tattoo and piercing shops with not many statistics to back it up yet. Tammi Bergman, NP, of ERiver Neurology, who specializes in headache relief, says that she always encourages her patients to try things like this as alternative relief measures to medication. “I haven’t really heard of it yet, none of my patients have done it,” she said. “It could just be too new, and in the blogs, but often that’s where these things get started.” Bergman was the only medical professional quoted in the article, which primarily included comment from migraine sufferers and body modification studio owners. Evidence presented about the efficacy of daith piercings for migraine relief was purely anecdotal (and the source of the claim unclear): Dave Kurlander, owner of the Tempest Artistic Studio in Hopewell Junction, NY performs the daith piercing on clients, and he truly believes it’s the way to go. “I’ve had many people come to me looking for migraine relief. It’s a much cheaper alternative to medicine and even acupuncture, and many of their doctors recommend it to them, and if you’re into piercings that’s even better. Essentially it’s the same concept as acupuncture, the piercing hits a pressure point which then relieves the pressure in your head. I recommend getting it done on the ear that corresponds with the side of your head where most of your migraines hit.” In the long run it’s a toss up, it may not cure your headaches but you will be left with an ear piercing. Hey, you win some you lose some right? At this juncture, it’s worth noting a specific aspect of the daith piercing claim. While body modification may be inexpensive (compared to other alternative health options), it involves an aesthetic commitment that might not appeal to sufferers. Slightly less common than ear lobe piercings, a daith piercing likely wouldn’t physically harm a patient desperate for relief, but many sufferers could feel pressured to try it despite personal considerations (such as employer dress codes or discomfort with a cartilage piercing). Moreover, no non-anecdotal evidence was presented in the article touting the potential efficacy of such piercings. Even the health professional consulted (who adopted a “can’t hurt” stance) hadn’t heard of the rumor, much less matched it with any extant medical advice about migraine relief. No studies examined the potential benefit of ear piercings on migraine headaches, though some research has been carried out on acupuncture and migraines. Due in part to a dearth of steady treatment options for migraine sufferers, the efficacy of acupuncture on the condition has long been scrutinized in clinical settings. Data has been inconsistent but strongly favors a pronounced placebo effect in patients exposed to both “real” acupuncture and “sham” acupuncture (treatments that mimicked acupuncture in ways indetectable to the patients): Acupuncture appears to be effective for prophylaxis of migraine headaches, and may be slightly better than pharmacotherapy. Sham acupuncture is just as effective as real acupuncture. Researchers similarly theorized the negligible difference between true and simulated acupuncture suggested factors other than the alternative therapy itself influenced outcomes: In conclusion, we found acupuncture to be superior to both no-acupuncture control and sham acupuncture for the treatment of chronic pain. Although the data indicate that acupuncture is more than a placebo, the differences between true and sham acupuncture are relatively modest, suggesting that factors in addition to the specific effects of needling are important contributors to therapeutic effects. Overall, clinicians generally adopted the stance that while acupuncture was of questionable benefit, it wasn’t a harmful option for most patients resistant to first-line therapies: Acupuncture has been studied as a treatment for migraine headache for more than 20 years. While not all studies have shown it helps, researchers agree that acupuncture appears safe, and may work for some people. A study published in 2003 suggest that getting an acupuncture treatment when migraine symptoms first start works as well as taking the drug Imitrex. As symptoms continue, however, the medication works better than acupuncture. The article proposing daith piercings as a migraine treatment didn’t specify whether its conclusions were based on rumor or inference and didn’t cite any non-anecdotal evidence specifically supporting ear piercings as a viable alternative to acupuncture. No part of the article demonstrated a piercing would even work in the manner acupuncture purportedly did. How acupuncture’s scant benefits could even be approximated by a permanent body piercing wasn’t explained or referenced (and a number of social media users with the piercing report no reduction in episodic migraines). Even if daith piercings were deemed a sufficient analogue to acupuncture treatment (for which we could find no evidence), acupuncture itself is controversial at best and of exceptionally limited benefit (often a “last ditch” option among patients for whom all other treatments have failed). Accepted medical science generally holds it poses little risk, but clinical proof of its benefits remains elusive despite extensive research.
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6594
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Past few days ‘difficult’ for former Tennessee coach Summitt.
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Pat Summitt’s family said Sunday that the last few days have been difficult for the former Tennessee women’s basketball coach as her Alzheimer’s disease progresses.
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true
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Womens basketball, Top News, Health, Isabelle Harrison, Knoxville, Pat Summitt, Sports, Basketball, College Sports, Tamika Catchings, Tennessee, Alzheimers disease
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Amid reports of Summitt’s failing health, her family issued a statement asking for prayers and saying that the 64-year-old Summitt is surrounded by the people who mean the most to her. It also asked for privacy. The statement was posted on the Pat Summitt Foundation’s website and was issued by Erin Freeman, a spokeswoman for the Summitt family. Former Tennessee player Tamika Catchings was flying to Knoxville to visit the coach instead of returning to Indiana with the WNBA’s Fever. Other former players were issuing support on Twitter through the “PrayForPat” hashtag. Phoenix Mercury center and Tennessee alum Isabelle Harrison said former Lady Volunteers players were keeping up with Summitt’s situation in a group text-message chain. “There are like 30 of us in a group chat right now talking, and people are flying into Knoxville and trying to see her,” Harrison said Sunday after the Mercury’s victory over the New York Liberty. “You just didn’t expect any of this to happen. Everyone’s trying to fill each other in with any information they have.” Harrison said she often went to Summitt’s home and rehabbed with her last year while recovering from a torn anterior cruciate ligament that ended the post player’s senior season at Tennessee prematurely. They also occasionally went to practice together. “I was at practice one day watching some of the girls, (and a) freshman took a fast shot,” Harrison said. ”(Summitt) looked at me and was like, ‘What was wrong was that?’ I was like, ‘She shot too quick.’ (She said), ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ (Summitt) still had it.” The update about Summitt’s condition brought a flood of support from throughout the sports world. An outpouring of concern on social media came from rival coaches such as South Carolina’s Dawn Staley, Notre Dame’s Muffet McGraw and Vanderbilt’s Stephanie White. Other sympathetic tweets came from sports figures as varied as Billie Jean King and Steve Spurrier. Summitt stepped down as Tennessee’s coach in 2012, one year after announcing her diagnosis of early onset dementia, Alzheimer’s type. She went 1,098-208 with eight national titles. She has the most career wins of any Division I men’s or women’s basketball coach. Since her diagnosis, Summitt has played a leading role in the fight against Alzheimer’s. She launched the Pat Summitt Foundation, which is dedicated to researching and educating people about the disease while also providing services to patients and caregivers. The Pat Summitt Alzheimer’s Clinic is scheduled to open at the University of Tennessee medical center in December. “When she fights this disease, what she has taught all of us is how to do it with courage,” former Tennessee women’s athletic director Joan Cronan said at a 2015 charity event honoring Summitt. “She’s done that from Day One. It’s been about (how) we can find a cure for this disease, and she has done it facing it straight-on and she’s done it giving back as she always has.” Summitt continues to hold a position as head coach emeritus of the Tennessee women’s basketball team. She attended nearly every home game and many practices in the first year after stepped down as coach, though she had a less visible role in subsequent seasons. She cut back on public appearances in recent years. --- AP Basketball Writer Doug Feinberg in New York contributed to this report.
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35180
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Onions placed in bowls around your home will fight off the flu virus.
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An old servant (Essex) … recently complained that … Spanish onions … were too big. When an obvious method of getting over that difficulty was suggested, she replied, ‘Oh, no! that would never do! It’s so unlucky to have a cut onion in the house.’
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false
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Medical, Home Cures
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Although influenza is no longer the unchecked grim reaper of years past (in 1918 it killed half a million Americans and twenty to forty million folks worldwide), it continues to present a very real danger even in these more modern times. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), millions of people in the United States (about 10% to 20% of U.S. residents) will get the flu each year. Influenza also costs Americans $10 billion annually in lost wages and medical expenses. Worst of all, every year about 36,000 people in the United States die from it, and 114,000 have to be admitted to the hospital because of it. The flu is not just a week of feeling lousy and missing work; it is a disease that can and does kill. The 2009 outbreak of H1N1 (swine) flu brought home even to those who didn’t normally ponder such matters the danger posed by contagions dismissively regarded in other years as mere seasonal flu, maladies that are thought of as wholly unpleasant but not life threatening. In 2009, people became more aware of the sniffles and sneezes around them. Also, unlike in other years, more folks were actively looking for ways to avoid catching the flu — including by unconventional means, such as those referenced in the following message: Onions, for collecting the flu virus: In 1919 when the flu killed 40 million people there was this Doctor that visited the many farmers to see if he could help them combat the flu. Many of the farmers and their family had contracted it and many died. The doctor came upon this one farmer and to his surprise, everyone was very healthy. When the doctor asked what the farmer was doing that was different the wife replied that she had placed an unpeeled onion in a dish in the rooms of the home, (probably only two rooms back then). The doctor couldn’t believe it and asked if he could have one of the onions and placed it under the microscope. She gave him one and when he did this, he did find the flu virus in the onion. It obviously absorbed the virus, therefore, keeping the family healthy. Now, I heard this story from my hairdresser in AZ. She said that several years ago many of her employees were coming down with the flu and so were many of her customers. The next year she placed several bowls with onions around in her shop. To her surprise, none of her staff got sick. It must work.. (And no, she is not in the onion business.) The moral of the story is, buy some onions and place them in bowls around your home. If you work at a desk, place one or two in your office or under your desk or even on top somewhere. Try it and see what happens. We did it last year and we never got the flu. If this helps you and your loved ones from getting sick, all the better. If you do get the flu, it just might be a mild case.. Whatever, what have you to lose? Just a few bucks on onions! In addition to the good advice about washing one’s hands frequently and avoiding the company of those who are obviously under the weather, those looking to sidestep being felled by the flu are subject to toutings of a variety of folk remedies, each of which is presented as a surefire and deadly preventive. The missive quoted above about onions absorbing the virus is one such offering. There’s no medical magic to placing peeled or cut onions around the home: they don’t act as sponges that soak up whatever viruses or other nasty microbes are in their immediate vicinity. However, the belief that they would act in this fashion predates the 2009 flu outbreak by at least 100 years. Long-standing superstition asserts that keeping raw onions in the house (either cut or whole; different folks swear by different methods) will draw illness-causing germs from the air, thereby rendering the home free of contamination. The following print references gathered by folklorists Iona Opie and Moira Tatum showcase that belief: The onion is cut up and stood in an old tin-plate. Then you place it in the room where the sick child sleeps. The onion draws the complaint into itself, and when the child is better care must be taken to see that the onion is properly burnt. When there’s flu about, I puts a plate of cut up onion in every room. That’s what keeps colds away … All the cold germs goes into they. I fondly remember the smell of my mother’s window sill adorned with half onions. She swore by the legend that the onions captured any incoming germs and purified the air. Even older print sightings exist, however. One of the earliest we’ve located (from 1900) calls the practice “an old custom,” which means even at that early date, the belief’s origins were lost in the mists of time: [Chambers’ Journal, 1900] In remote country villages one sometimes sees an old custom which, in its essence, is wise, though the performers do not know its why or wherefore; as their forbears did, so do they. This is to place plates full of sliced onion at the side of any bed or coffin wherein lies the body of a person dead of infections [sic] disease. This good and shrewd practice was based on the observation of the blackening of the onion and practical experience of the usefulness of the habit, not on scientific knowledge. But the floating germs were attracted to that blackening onion, and settled on thickly, the result being the onion’s discoloration and the great purification of the air in the death-chamber. The story is true of a house wherein ropes of onions intended for sale were hung escaping a smallpox epidemic, which attacked the neighbouring houses. [Los Angeles Times, 1913] In a sickroom you cannot have a better disinfectant than the onion. It has a wonderful capacity for absorbing germs. A dish of sliced onions placed in a sickroom will draw away the disease; they must be removed as soon as they lose their odor and become discolored, and be replaced by fresh ones. [The Chicago Defender, 1922] In remote villages the old custom still exists of placing a plate full of sliced onion beside the bed or coffin of any persons who had died of an infectious disease. Although those who follow this practice cannot explain it, the fact is that the raw onion destroys germs and purifies the infected air of the death chamber. Some people insist plates of sliced raw onion should be left at various points around the home; others avow that whole onions must be hung on strings affixed to the domicile’s ceilings, some further asserting the bulbs must be hung in front of doorways to better filter incoming contamination. As to what sorts of contamination the onion is purported to overcome, at various times it has been said to kill flu virus, diphtheria, smallpox, the cold virus, and even whatever nastiness a rotting corpse might be venting into the air, especially one that reached that condition via infectious disease of any description. Onions are also, according to lore, to be placed in any sickroom no matter how that room’s occupant came to require bedrest. While this folk belief is indeed an old one, there’s precious little reason to place any store in it. No scientific studies back it, and common sense rules it out: cold and flu viruses are spread by contact, not by their nasty microbes floating loosely in the air where the almighty onion can supposedly seek out and destroy them. As the Wall Street Journal noted in 2009 of such claims: Biologists say it’s highly implausible that onions could attract flu virus as a bug zapper traps flies. Viruses require a living host to replicate and can’t propel themselves out of a body and across a room. The idea that onions have medicinal properties goes back millennia and spans many cultures. Egyptians thought onions were fertility symbols. Ancient Greeks rubbed them on sore muscles, and Native Americans used them to treat coughs and colds. Herbalists note that the World Health Organization recognizes onion extracts for providing relief in the treatment of coughs, colds, asthma and bronchitis. As with most home remedies, there have been few scientific studies with humans — and none on record involving raw onions placed across a room. Furthermore, for those who believe in folk claims, superstition also asserts that it is unlucky to keep cut onions around, as demonstrated in these additional examples gathered by Opie and Tatum: [1855] To have a cut onion lying about in the house breeds distempers. [1891]
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36599
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Vehicle fuel gauges feature a small arrow on the car's interior indicating the side of the vehicle on which its gas tank is located.
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Does the Arrow on a Car’s Gas Gauge Indicate Which Side Has the Fuel Tank?
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mixture
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Fact Checks, Viral Content
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A tweet published in December 2018 reiterated a long-circulating purported “life hack,” in which an easy-to-miss arrow on a car’s gas gauge indicated the side of the vehicle on which its gas tank was located:How old were you when you realized the arrow on the gas pump in your car shows which side the gas tank is on? pic.twitter.com/Bb7BlD76k5— Tony Posnanski (@tonyposnanski) December 18, 2018The tweet alluded to the popular “today years old” meme phrasing, hinting that few people are aware that such an indicator exists on their vehicles.In June 2017, WPVI published a piece about the tip, as did car insurer Allstate on their blog in August 2012. Advice about gas pump indicator arrows appeared as far back as blog posts published in 2008.Allstate described a common annoyance drivers encountered in rental vehicles or other unfamiliar cars:Last week while driving a rental car, I pulled up at a gas station and experienced the dreaded “Oh no!” moment: I had no idea on which side of my car the gas cap was located. If you’re like me, the initial “Oh no!” is followed by a few moments of awkwardly craning your neck out the window in hopes of seeing (or not seeing) the gas door on the driver’s side. More often than not, however, I guess and just pull up to the pump — only to back up and circle around when my guess is wrong.The item went on to detail the gas gauge indicator tip, but with a caveat — when available, the arrow appears to only be a feature in relatively new cars, and the feature is apparently a courtesy, not a standard:Good news: The secret to the gas cap location has been on our dashboards all along. If you are driving a newer car (as many rental cars are), then take a look at the arrow by the gas gauge on your dashboard. Depending on your car, it may look like a triangle pointing to the left or right … What about in older cars that lack the arrow? Can gas gauges tell us on which side the gas cap is located? Older cars still have a gas pump icon located near the gas gauge. The pump icon’s handle either extends to the left or right.So does the handle location indicate which side to pull up next to the gas pump? Unfortunately, this popular Internet rumor has been shot down. Sometimes there is a correlation between the pump handle and the gas cap location, but it appears to be simply coincidence. The side of the handle does not always indicate the side of the gas pump; only the gas gauge arrow, featured on newer models, does.General images of gas gauges illustrated this disparity. While the Toyota Corolla (model year uncertain) on the left featured the indicating arrow, a 2003 Honda Civic on the right did not:As for the origins of gas gauge arrows, automotive site Jalopnik delved into the disputed genesis of the trend, when it possibly started, and around which year (1997) automakers purportedly began featuring gauge indicators:The unsung hero/inventor of the fuel filler dashboard arrow is a designer named Jim Moylan, who worked for Ford. The idea came to Moylan in April of 1986, who had to fill up a Ford company car in the rain, and was frustrated when he got soaked because he picked the wrong side. He wrote up a memo with the idea, sent it off to his bosses, and that’s pretty much how it happened.The bosses saw the value in the (pleasingly cheap-to-implement) idea, and in 1989, the Ford Escort and Mercury Tracer became the first cars to have the little fuel filler-location arrow.Again, sort of.See, while I’m not disputing Moylan’s story—I 100 percent believe he came up with the idea independently—I do think the fuel filler-location arrow has an earlier genesis, and it’s one that, frustratingly, its parent company doesn’t even acknowledge. I think the first example of the fuel filler-location arrow shows up in 1976, on the dash cluster of the Mercedes-Benz W123…[…]Unfortunately, the tenacious sleuths over at Every Little Thing found that Mercedes-Benz themselves seems to have totally forgotten about this, and thinks that they started putting the little arrow on their dashes with the 1997 G-Class.An undated blog post cites a Consumer Reports engineer’s claim that a majority of new model vehicles feature the gas pump indicator arrow, but both of those categories were relatively vague. It also follows that a minority of new cars do not feature the indicator near their gas gauges.Claims about the gas gauge indicator arrow are true. According to automotive experts and consumer advocates, the feature is at least common on “new” vehicles — but we found no clear model year tipping point for widespread inclusion. The tip is likely to help drivers of rental cars, fleets of which tended to be new relative to cars on the road.Drivers (or borrowers) of older vehicles might not take note of an absent gas gauge indicator until they are already incorrectly parked at a gas pump, but the claim appears to be one that gets more true as time passes.But in some ways, it also became less true; at the same time the tweet above circulated, a viral video of a woman purportedly trying (and failing) to put gas in an all-electric vehicle made by Tesla made the rounds
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31520
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Various restaurants around the world were shut down for serving for serving human meat.
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In July 2016 the Spanish-language “satirical daily” web site La Voz Popular published a spoof about “Edible Brother,” a human flesh restaurant in Tokyo, that was picked up by other sites in November 2017 and run as if it were legitimate news.
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false
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Junk News, bbc, cannibalism, human meat
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Rumors that some restaurant was shut down for serving human meat have been circulating online for years and flare up again from time to time, as in one report published by the web site news.states-tv.com in 2017 that claimed one such restaurant was called “Rose Kitchen” and was located in a hotel in Pretoria, South Africa: A hotel restaurant in pretoria, south africa has been shuttered by authorities for serving human flesh. According to our local correspondent, suspicious residents told police of rumors that the restaurant was cooking human meat for customers. Police then raided the restaurant, where they discovered fresh human heads that were still bleeding. The blood was in the process of being drained into a plastic bag. The restaurant, named Rose Kitchen, is a popular eating place in Sunnyside Pretoria. However, news.states-tv.com and other web sitea, such as Meganews360 and CNN Channel, published near-verbatim versions of the very same story, with the setting of the “human flesh” restaurant changed to Valletta, Malta, or Nairobi, Kenya, or Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Although this text has made frequent appearances on disreputable web sites, these stories were all based on an errant and error-filled article published by BBC Swahili in May 2015. The BBC eventually removed the article, then released a statement saying that there was absolutely no truth to the story: The story about the Nigerian restaurant which we published here was a mistake and we apologise. It was incorrect and published without the proper BBC checks. We have removed the story and have launched an urgent investigation into how this happened. The BBC Swahili service’s reputation for accuracy and balance remains of paramount importance to us and we are taking the appropriate steps to insure that mistakes like this do not happen again. It is likely that the BBC conflated a genuine report from 2013 about two skulls being discovered in a Nigerian hotel room and a poorly sourced tabloid story about a restaurant serving human meat, the combination which created a rumor that then took on a life of its own. Despite the BBC’s retraction, uncorrected versions of this story are still available on news sites such as MSN and the UK’s Express as of this writing. Disreputable web sites have also managed to keep this rumor in circulation by reposting the above-displayed text (occasionally changing the location) along with gruesome photographs of the alleged precooked cadavers: Neither of these images show actual human meat — they are both props originally created to promote the zombie video game Resident Evil 6. Another version of the hoax promotes the claim that restaurants in Tokyo serving human meat had opened; reporter Benjamin Fulford posted one such story, discussing a “noodle shop featuring broth made from human bones and flesh,” on 1 April 2016. However, Fulford made it clear that the piece was meant as an April Fool’s joke by identifying himself as a reporter from “CNN” — Cannibal News Network.
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35932
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Phil Spector deliberately recorded a unreleasable song called 'The Screw' in order to cheat his former partner out of court-ordered royalty payments.
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Moreover, if Spector were going to try the legal dodge of issuing a record he knew wouldn’t sell so as to technically fulfill the terms of a settlement while generating as few royalties as possible, he had to put at least some copies of the record on the market so that it had a chance to sell, even if no one wanted it. But according to Ribowsky, “the record was not intended for release, and the only person who received a copy was Lester Sill.” (A few other copies are known to exist, making “[Let’s Dance] The Screw” one of the rarest of record collectibles.)
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false
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Entertainment, music
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The relationship between the worlds of art and commerce has long been an uneasy one. Artists, beholden to commercial concerns, have often found themselves having to compromise both the quality and the quantity of their work in order to live up to contractual obligations. The music, publishing, and film industries are rife with tales of the extremes creative types have sometimes resorted to in order to get out from under commitments they found to be no longer desirable yet still binding. After the breakup of Creedence Clearwater Revival, for example, John Fogerty found his solo career was bound by an onerous contract that obligated him to continue recording for a label, Fantasy Records, whose owner he despised. Fogerty couldn’t possibly produce enough material to fulfill the terms of the contract, but neither could he record for anyone else until he did. When Fantasy’s owner refused to let him out of his obligations, Fogerty took the drastic step of surrendering all future royalties for his Creedence Clearwater Revival work in order to be allowed to move to another label. (Forgerty’s antipathy towards Fantasy Records and its president, Saul Zaentz, was the reason why he refused to perform any Creedence Clearwater Revival material for many years.) The other end of the spectrum involves artists who deliberately create substandard work in order to fulfill the technical requirements of a contract while “kissing off” the other party by delivering product practically guaranteed not to sell. Most contracts now have an “acceptability” clause to guard against such an eventuality, a concept that was played out in the tabloids in 1996 when actress Joan Collins was sued by her publisher, Random House. Collins had signed a deal to write two novels for Random House in exchange for $4 million, but the finished work she had submitted was so dreadfully bad that the publisher demanded the return of Collins’ $1.3 million advance. Collins countersued, claiming that her contract only required her to deliver “complete manuscripts,” not “acceptable” ones. Collins eventually prevailed, with the court ruling that not only could she could keep her advance, but that Random House owed her an additional $1.3 million for her first novel. The publisher was allowed to forgo paying her for the second book, however, as it was deemed to be merely a rehash of the first novel and not a separate piece of work. No one claimed that Collins had deliberately submitted substandard work, but that claim has been attached to one of the most famous producers in popular music history, and to an infamously legendary record. In 1958, at the tender age of 17, wunderkind musician Phil Spector wrote, sang on, and produced the #1 hit “To Know Him Is To Love Him.” Record production was Spector’s forte, however, and three years later, after having produced singles for a variety of record labels, the notoriously temperamental and egotistical Spector finally gained the complete artistic control he wanted with the formation of his own record label, Philles Records in 1961. Philles Records wasn’t wholly Spector’s own label, though. The company was a partnership between Spector and Lester Sill, “the most ubiquitous and well-connected figure in the West Coast rock scene,” for whom Spector had crafted his highest-charting record to date as a professional producer, the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me” (a #5 hit in 1961). Hence the label was an amalgam of the two men’s given names: Phil + Les = Philles (not “Phillies,” like the Philadelphia baseball team). Over the next few years, Phil Spector turned out a string of hits on Philles with groups such as the Crystals, the Ronettes, and the Righteous Brothers, all utilizing his famous “Wall of Sound” production techniques. But along the way, Spector — whose “peevish independence” doomed his being a joint participant in any creative venture — inevitably had a falling-out with his partner. It was his artistic genius that had made Philles a success, Spector felt, and he wasn’t about to share the rewards with someone else any longer than necessary — especially after Lester Sill had the impudence to interrupt Spector’s string of hits by producing and releasing non-charting singles of his own on Philles. When Spector started calling meetings at which he failed to appear, made himself nearly impossible to reach, and began signing contracts and arranging business deals without consulting Sill, the end of the partnership was in sight, only a year after it had begun. Lester Sill eventually sold out his share of Philles Records to Phil Spector for $60,000, and he didn’t even manage to collect that small sum, as Spector withheld the money, claiming that Sill still owed him royalties for his work with the Paris Sisters the year before. Sill then had to sue Spector to recoup payment for his share of Philles, precipitating Spector’s creation of the most notorious contracting-ending recording in pop music history. In January 1963, Phil Spector went into the studio with Philles’ best-selling act, the Crystals, along with pianist Michael Spencer and two other musicians, to record a Spector-penned tune entitled “(Let’s Dance) The Screw – Part 1.” The “song” featured the Crystals, backed by a catchy dance beat provided by piano, bass, and drums, warbling a verse that went something like this: Let’s do it. C’mon and do it. To the right, to the left. Now front, now back. C’mon and do . . . The chorus consisted of nothing but the word “dance” chanted six times, preceded and followed by Spector’s monotonic exhortation to “Dance the screw.” Chorus and verse were repeated over and over for close to six minutes, and the results were pressed as a record labeled Philles 111. The B-side was, of course, “(Let’s Dance) The Screw – Part 2”: another six minutes of the same thing. A copy of said record, stamped “D. J. COPY – NOT FOR SALE,” was duly delivered to Lester Sill: The legend surrounding this act of musical revenge is that as part of his legal settlement with Spector, Lester Sill was awarded the royalties from the sales of next Philles single. By deliberately creating an unreleasable product, the tale went, Spector had “screwed” his former partner out of any additional money: The story goes that Spector lost a lawsuit, and the guy he lost it to demanded the royalties to the next Crystals record as compensation. So Spector recorded a little ditty in which a man says the title over and over, and pressed up a couple of copies. Neat revenge. The “screwed out of royalties” aspect of the legend does not stand up to scrutiny, however. Mark Ribowsky’s biography of Phil Spector quotes Lester Sill extensively, and Sill says nothing about having demanded royalties from the next Philles single as part of his settlement. It also seems unlikely that Sill would have suddenly changed tack in court and willingly made his compensation be dependent upon Spector’s future commercial success rather than simply asking for a set amount of money, especially since he had originally agreed to sell out for $60,000 just to be shed of Spector: I sold out for a pittance. It was shit, ridiculous, around $60,000. I didn’t want to but I had to. Let me tell you, I couldn’t live with Phillip … I just wanted the fuck out of there. If I wouldn’t have, I would have killed him. It wasn’t worth the aggravation. No matter how important it was, it wasn’t that important.
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26547
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Facebook post Says a “5G LAW PASSED while everyone was distracted” with the coronavirus pandemic and lists 20 symptoms associated with 5G exposure.
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President Donald Trump signed a law March 23 that tasks the federal government with securing 5G data networks. It does not explicitly provide for the installation of more cell towers. While some experts are concerned about the potential health effects of 5G, there is no evidence to support the symptoms listed in the post. Misinformation about the health effects of 5G can be traced to a 2019 propaganda campaign promoted by Russian state television.
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false
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Facebook Fact-checks, Coronavirus, Facebook posts,
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"A conspiracy theory with roots in a Russian propaganda campaign is getting new life amid the coronavirus pandemic. In a March 28 post, a Facebook user refers to Public Law No. 116-129 and claims the government is taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to distract from the installation of 5G cellular data towers. The technology is the latest upgrade to speed up wireless internet connections. ""5G LAW PASSED while everyone was distracted,"" the post reads. ""Signed into law 116-129 on 3-23-2020, that will speed up the installation of 5G and protect profits! Children had to be out of schools for the covert installation. Parents are you seeing what's happening?"" The post also lists 20 purported symptoms of 5G exposure, including shortness of breath and fever — symptoms similar to those of COVID-19. The posts were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) (Screenshot from Facebook) We’ve fact-checked other conspiracy theories that falsely connect the coronavirus outbreak to the development of 5G, so we wanted to look into this one, too. There is no evidence that the new law was deliberately passed during the COVID-19 pandemic. And while some experts have speculated that 5G’s high-frequency radio waves could have some adverse health effects, such as neurological disorders, other reports say the fear is overblown. On March 23, President Donald Trump signed a law that requires the president to work with federal agencies to ""secure and protect"" 5G infrastructure in the United States. ""The Act requires the President to develop and implement a strategy for the adoption of secure wireless communications technology in the United States and abroad,"" Trump said in a White House statement. ""The strategy will protect the American people from security threats to telecommunications networks and 5G technology."" The Secure 5G and Beyond Act contains a provision to ""protect the competitiveness of United States companies,"" but it says nothing about the ""covert installation"" of 5G towers, as the Facebook post claims. The legislation is not specifically focused on speeding up the implementation of 5G. By March 23, the coronavirus crisis was well underway in the U.S. The World Health Organization reported 31,573 confirmed cases across the country, and Trump said during a press briefing that the numbers ""are going to increase with time."" However, there is no evidence that Congress waited to pass the 5G law during the coronavirus outbreak. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced the legislation last spring, and the Senate Commerce Committee finalized it in December. The full Senate passed the bill on March 4. The second part of the Facebook post lists a slew of symptoms purportedly associated with exposure to 5G networks. While some experts are concerned about the potential health effects of 5G, there is no evidence to support the flu-like effects listed in the post. Joel Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, supports a moratorium on 5G development. He wrote in Scientific American that there could be health effects and that research needs to be funded. ""The latest cellular technology, 5G, will employ millimeter waves for the first time in addition to microwaves that have been in use for older cellular technologies, 2G through 4G,"" he wrote. ""Given limited reach, 5G will require cell antennas every 100 to 200 meters, exposing many people to millimeter wave radiation."" Short-term exposure to millimeter waves can cause physiological effects in the nervous system, immune system and cardiovascular system, while long-term exposure could lead to conditions like melanoma and sterility, according to Moskowitz. However, he also wrote that there is no research to confirm a correlation between 5G exposure and those broad health conditions, much less the very specific symptoms listed in the Facebook post. — Rod Waterhouse, an electrical engineer, wireless-communications entrepreneur and editor of a report on 5G, speaking to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ""There’s little reason to think 5G frequencies are any more harmful than other types of electromagnetic radiation, like visible light."" — Wired magazine ""The 5G Health Hazard That Isn’t — How one scientist and his inaccurate chart led to unwarranted fears of wireless technology."" — New York Times headline False and misleading social media posts about 5G and coronavirus are similar to a Russian propaganda campaign that’s aimed at delegitimizing the technology’s implementation in the U.S. In May 2019, the New York Times reported that Russian network RT America was airing unsubstantiated reports linking 5G exposure to brain cancer, infertility and autism. ""It’s economic warfare,"" Ryan Fox, chief operating officer of technology firm New Knowledge, told the New York Times. ""Russia doesn’t have a good 5G play, so it tries to undermine and discredit ours."" Hundreds of blogs and websites have republished RT’s dubious claims about 5G, according to the newspaper. And over the past week, we’ve seen dozens of Facebook and Instagram posts build on that misinformation by baselessly linking the coronavirus pandemic to the development of 5G. (Screenshot from Instagram) The conspiracies are particularly popular among anti-vaccine and alternative-health Facebook groups and Instagram accounts. In a March 30 Instagram post, which has more than 146,000 likes, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promoted a conspiracy theory about 5G and the coronavirus. Kennedy, the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, is among the biggest sources of anti-vaccine advertisements on Facebook. ""The quarantine has facilitated the unobstructed #5G rollout,"" Kennedy said in his post, which echoes the claims made in the March 28 Facebook post. According to Google Trends, search queries for ""coronavirus 5G"" have spiked since early March. A Facebook post claimed that the government used the coronavirus pandemic to distract from the passage of a 5G law. Trump signed a law March 23 that aims to ""secure and protect"" 5G infrastructure in the U.S. The legislation has a provision to protect American companies, but it says nothing about installing more 5G towers. While some experts have said there could be adverse health effects associated with 5G, other reports say the fears are overblown. Misinformation about 5G and the coronavirus can be traced to a Russian propaganda campaign that seeks to delegitimize the implementation of 5G. The Facebook post contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression."
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6111
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EPA ends clean air policy opposed by fossil fuel interests.
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The Trump administration announced Thursday it is doing away with a decades-old air emissions policy opposed by fossil fuel companies, a move that environmental groups say will result in more pollution.
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true
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Clean Air Act, Politics, North America, Environment, Business, Pollution
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The Environmental Protection Agency said it was withdrawing the “once-in always-in” policy under the Clean Air Act, which dictated how major sources of hazardous air pollutants are regulated. Under the EPA’s new interpretation, such “major sources” as coal-fired power plants can be reclassified as “area sources” when their emissions fall below mandated limits, subjecting them to differing standards. Though formal notice of the reversal has not yet been filed, EPA said the policy it has followed since 1995 relied on an incorrect interpretation of the landmark anti-pollution law. “This guidance is based on a plain language reading of the statute that is in line with EPA’s guidance for other provisions of the Clean Air Act,” said Bill Wehrum, assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. “It will reduce regulatory burden for industries and the states, while continuing to ensure stringent and effective controls on hazardous air pollutants.” Prior to his confirmation by the GOP-dominated Senate in November, Wehrum worked as a lawyer representing fossil fuel and chemical companies. The American Petroleum Institute was among the industry groups that had called for the longstanding policy to be scraped. The Clean Air Act defines a “major source” as a one that has the potential to emit 10 tons or more per year of any hazardous air pollutant, or 25 tons per year of any combination of hazardous air pollutants. For more than 20 years, EPA’s “once-in always-in” required major sources to remain subject to stricter control standards, even if they took steps to reduce their pollution below the threshold. Republicans quickly cheered the move by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, especially those from states that produce oil, gas and coal. “The EPA’s decision today is consistent with President Trump’s agenda to keep America’s air clean and our economy growing,” said Senate Environment Committee Chairman John Barrasso of Wyoming. “Withdrawal of this policy means manufacturers, oil and gas operations, and other types of industrial facilities will have greater incentive to reduce emissions.” Environmentalists predicted the change would drastically weaken limits on toxic heavy metals emitted from power-plant smokestacks. “This is among the most dangerous actions that the Trump EPA has taken yet against public health,” said John Walke, the director for clean air issues at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Rolling back longstanding protections to allow the greatest increase in hazardous air pollutants in our nation’s history is unconscionable. John Coequyt, who leads climate policy initiatives for the Sierra Club, said the move will lead directly to dirtier air and more deaths. “Trump and Pruitt are essentially creating a massive loophole that will result in huge amounts of toxic mercury, arsenic, and lead being poured into the air we breathe, meaning this change is a threat to anyone who breathes and a benefit only to dangerous corporate polluters,” Coequyt said. ___ Follow Associated Press environmental reporter Michael Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck
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103
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Two charities to pay $6 million to resolve U.S. pharma kickback probe.
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Two charities will pay $6 million to resolve claims they operated as pass-throughs for seven pharmaceutical companies to pay kickbacks to Medicare patients using their high-priced medications, the U.S. Justice Department said on Friday.
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true
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Health News
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The settlements with the patient assistance charities Good Days and Patient Access Network Foundation were the first with foundations linked to an industry-wide probe that has resulted in $840 million in settlements with drugmakers. Both foundations provide assistance to patients seeking to pay out-of-pocket costs for medications. Good Days agreed to pay $2 million while PAN Foundation agreed to pay $4 million. Neither admitted wrongdoing. Good Days in a statement said the settlement will allow it to concentrate on providing help to people in need of life-saving medications. PAN said the settlement involved “legacy matters” rather than its current operations. Drug companies are prohibited from subsidizing co-payments for patients enrolled in the government’s Medicare healthcare program for those aged 65 and older. Companies may donate to non-profits providing co-pay assistance as long as they are independent. But the government has alleged that various drugmakers have used charities like Good Days and PAN as means to improperly pay the co-pay obligations of Medicare patients using their drugs, in violation of the Anti-Kickback Statute. The department said Good Days, previously known as the Chronic Disease Fund, from 2010 to 2014 conspired with companies including Novartis AG, Astellas and Questcor, now owned by Mallinckrodt Plc, to pay kickbacks to Medicare patients using their drugs. Those drugs included H.P. Acthar Gel, an expensive treatment for a rare infant seizure disorder and multiple sclerosis that is subject of a related lawsuit by the government against Mallinckrodt over Questcor’s donations to the charity. The Justice Department said Questcor from 2010 to 2014 used the charity as a conduit to improperly subsidize patients’ copays, allowing it to keep raising prices for Acthar, whose price increased from $50 per vial in 2001 to $32,200 in 2014. Mallinckrodt declined to comment. It has said it believed its actions were lawful. PAN similarly permitted Bayer AG, Astellas, Dendreon Pharmaceuticals and Amgen Inc to use it as a conduit to pay patients kickbacks, according to the government’s allegations. Astellas and Amgen in April agreed to pay $100 million and $24.75 million, respectively, to resolve related claims. Dendreon said it takes compliance seriously. Novartis declined to comment. The other companies’ representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
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5292
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Abortion-rights activists renew battle in Argentina.
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Argentine activists launched a renewed effort Tuesday seeking to legalize elective abortions in the homeland of Pope Francis after narrowly falling short last year.
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true
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Campaigns, Reproductive rights, Health, Abortion, Buenos Aires, Legislation, Latin America, Caribbean, Penelope Cruz, Pope Francis, Womens health, Argentina, Bills, Religion
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Lawmakers said they would introduce a bill that would legalize abortion for pregnancies up to 14 weeks. A similar measure last year passed the lower house of Congress but was defeated in the Senate under heavy opposition by religious groups. The movement behind the legislation came closer than ever to approval and activists promised to continue their campaign to expand women’s reproductive rights. The new legislation was being introduced as demonstrations marking the International Day of Action for Women’s Health were held in Argentina and other nations. Thousands of people marched through the streets of Buenos Aires chanting and waving flags. The Argentine movement has gathered international support, with Penelope Cruz and several other actors at the Cannes film festival holding up the green handkerchiefs that symbolize the abortion movement. “After last year’s rejection, it’s evident that abortion continues to be practiced in terrible conditions and women continue to die,” said Amnesty International Argentina director Mariela Belski. Argentina now allows abortion only in cases of rape or a risk to a woman’s health. But Argentine women continue to undergo illegal abortions and thousands of women, mostly poor, are hospitalized each year for complications. The health ministry estimates more than 350,000 clandestine abortions are carried out each year, while human rights groups put the number as high as a half million. The new legislation differs from last year’s because it doesn’t include a section that would have granted doctors the right “to a conscientious objection” to the process. It also would protect women who carry out their own abortions from any sanctions and includes a section focused on sexual education and counseling for women. The measure would also establish prison terms of three months to one year for health establishments or doctors who “unjustifiably delay,” block or refuse to carry out an elective abortion within the terms of the law. It would set longer prison terms if such actions damaged a woman’s health or caused her death. “Being a mother should be a choice, not an obligation,” said Jenny Duran, a member of the abortion rights campaign. “We call on lawmakers to do the right thing — listen to women’s voices and respect our right to make our own decisions about our bodies.” Ruling party lawmaker Daniel Lipovetzky said “it won’t be so easy” to debate a proposal that divides people so much during an election year. “But this is an issue that needs to be debated by society,” he said. Last year, conservative President Mauricio Macri had promised to sign the legislation if it passed Congress even though he opposes abortion. After it was rejected in the Senate, Macri said the debate would continue. Argentina became the first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage in 2010. More recently, the Ni Una Menos, or Not One Less, movement created in Argentina to fight violence against women has spread worldwide. Efforts to ease or tighten abortion restrictions have repeatedly emerged across Latin America and the Caribbean in recent years as socially conservative countries grapple with shifting views on once-taboo issues and the church continues to lose influence to secularism and a crisis of confidence after an avalanche of clerical sex abuse scandals. Pope Francis last year denounced abortion as the “white glove” equivalent of Nazi-era eugenics programs and urged families “to accept the children that God gives them.” The pope recently said abortion can never be condoned, even when the fetus is seriously ill or likely to die. He also urged doctors and priests to support families to carry such pregnancies to term. “Is it licit to throw away a life to resolve a problem?” the pontiff asked. “Is it licit to hire a hit man to resolve a problem?” His comments came as the abortion debate is rousing renewed debate in the U.S. with state initiatives seeking to restrict the procedure. In 2017, Chile became the last country in South America to drop a ban on abortions in all cases, though some countries in Central America still prohibit abortions without exceptions. __ Associated Press journalists Almudena Calatrava, Debora Rey, Paul Byrne and Leo Lavalle contributed to this report.
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214
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GSK's long acting HIV injection gets boost from study.
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GlaxoSmithKline’s experimental HIV injection is as effective when given every other month as monthly, according to a study, a convenience that could help the British drugmaker in its battle against a rival drug from Gilead Sciences.GSK’s two-drug injection was as effective as a monthly dose of the same regimen in maintaining viral suppression at 48 weeks in a late-stage study, said ViiV Healthcare, GSK’s HIV unit.
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true
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Health News
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Detailed results will be presented at an unspecified medical conference, the company added. ViiV, in which Pfizer and Shionogi have small stakes, is working on two-drug combinations and will use the lower drug burden in comparison with three-drug cocktails such as Gilead’s Biktarvy as its main selling point to patients and physicians. It is banking on longer-term studies to yield hard evidence of fewer side effects over time. ViiV has taken a two-pronged approach. While its once-a-day pill Dovato, also a two-drug combination, won U.S. market approval in April, the company is following up with a longer-acting injection combining the two active ingredients cabotegravir and Janssen’s rilpivirine. The injection has previously proven to be as effective as standard daily pills with three active ingredients when administered monthly. Thursday’s results showed that doubling the time between injections does not compromise efficacy or safety. Injections - targeted at patients unable to take, or not comfortable with, daily pills - are, however, seen as a smaller market opportunity than oral medicines. “This is further progress in our efforts to reduce the number of medicines a person living with HIV must take while also reducing the frequency of treatments,” said Kimberly Smith, Head of Research & Development at ViiV. The trial focused on the HIV-1 category of the AIDS virus, which has the most widespread strains. If not quelled, an HIV infection causes AIDS, a deadly condition that severely weakens the immune system. U.S. drugmaker Gilead dominates the HIV market and it will keep up the pressure with fast-growing Biktarvy, which was approved early last year. Analysts on average expect sales from the product to reach $5 billion next year, according to Refinitiv data.
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12962
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Pads and tampons (are) still taxed when Viagra and Rogaine are not.
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"Judd said, ""Pads and tampons (are) still taxed when Viagra and Rogaine are not."" Most states do tax tampons and pads, but not Viagra. Judd is off the mark for Rogaine, which is taxed in most states. But it’s important to note that these taxes apply to broad categories and are not specific to tampons or Viagra. Birth control, for example, would also be exempt from taxation in most states because it, like Viagra, is a prescription drug."
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mixture
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Women, Taxes, PunditFact, Ashley Judd,
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"Actress Ashley Judd declared herself a nasty woman at the Women’s March in Washington D.C., referring to President Donald Trump’s comment about Hillary Clinton during the general election campaign. Reciting a poem from 19-year-old Nina Donovan of Tennessee, Judd said she is nasty as in ""loud, vulgar and proud"" but not as nasty as ""racism, fraud, conflict of interest, homophobia, sexual assault, transphobia, white supremacy, misogyny, ignorance, white privilege."" ""I am not nasty like the combo of Trump and Pence being served up to me in my voting booths. I'm nasty like the battles my grandmothers fought to get me into that voting booth,"" Judd said. ""Tell me, why are pads and tampons still taxed when Viagra and Rogaine are not?"" We’re happy to oblige, because Judd’s claim isn’t fully accurate. (We tried to reach Judd the day after the march but didn't hear back; we'll update this item if we do.) When it comes to sales taxes on purchases, states typically set the rules. Seven states currently exempt tampons, menstrual cups and pads from taxation, the latest of which came into effect Jan. 1, 2017 (Illinois), said sales tax consultant Diane Yetter. Washington D.C.’s exemption, passed in December 2016, is pending congressional approval, and Connecticut's will kick in July 1, 2018. Five states (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon) have no sales tax at all. So, as of Jan. 22, 2017, 38 states and D.C. tax feminine hygiene products. Because it is a prescription drug, Viagra, an erectile dysfunction medicine, isn’t taxed in any state except Illinois. Rogaine, a product for hair loss, is exempt from taxes in eight states because it is an over-the-counter treatment and doesn’t require a prescription. (Four states have qualified exemptions for nonprescription that Rogaine does not appear to qualify for.) We won’t weigh in on whether the disparity between taxation of feminine hygiene and erectile dysfunction drugs is ethical or sexist. But there is context for how that disparity came to exist. Nicole Kaeding, a state tax policy analyst at the free-market oriented Tax Foundation, stressed that the term ""tampon tax"" is a misnomer because feminine hygiene products are not subject to a specific tax in any state. ""There is no more a tampon tax than there is a soap tax, shampoo tax, or toilet paper tax,"" Kaeding said. As we mentioned, many states do provide exemptions for necessities like food and medicine. (Kaeding and the Tax Analysts’ David Brunori believe these items should be taxed as well.) But ""menstruation isn’t considered a disease or illness,"" said Yetter. ""Tampons and pads are often included in the category of grooming and hygiene products."" It’s also important to note that tax exemptions apply to broad categories and not any male product explicitly. ""You could easily pick a drug that only applies to females, say birth control pills, and those would fall under the same sales tax exemptions as Viagra or Rogaine,"" said Kaeding. Our ruling Judd said, ""Pads and tampons (are) still taxed when Viagra and Rogaine are not."" Most states do tax tampons and pads, but not Viagra. Judd is off the mark for Rogaine, which is taxed in most states. But it’s important to note that these taxes apply to broad categories and are not specific to tampons or Viagra. Birth control, for example, would also be exempt from taxation in most states because it, like Viagra, is a prescription drug."
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38196
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Charlottesville Police were told to stand down during demonstrations there in August 2017 that brought violent clashes between white nationalist protesters and counter-protesters that led to the death of a 32-year-old counter-protestor.
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Charlottesville Police Were Told to Stand Down During Protests-Reported as Fiction!
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false
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Crime / Police
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Police response to demonstrations in Charlottesville have drawn criticism from people on both sides of the issue — but there’s no evidence to support claims that Charlottesville Police were told to stand down. The rumor appears to have started with right-wing commentator and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones during an August 14, 2017, segment on his “InfoWars” talk show. In a clip posted on YouTube under the headline “Confirmed: Mayor Ordered Police Stand Down/Caused Death In Charlottesville , VA,” Jones argues that Charlottesville Police were told to stand down so that white nationalist protesters could be portrayed as violent by the media: …People playing in this whole white nationalist thing are morons. In my view, marching out there in the middle of this, you know you’re going to give George Soros and the media the target they need. Especially in a Democratic-controlled city where police are going to stand down. And then you’re going to be attacked, and then the media is going to say that you attacked. Jones said that a camera crew heard a police officer say they were told to stand down and played clips of media reports that were critical to the police response. But neither of those things prove that Charlottesville police were told to stand down by the mayor. In fact, it doesn’t appear that that would be possible. First, the Charlottesville mayor and vice mayor are largely “symbolic” titles that don’t carry much weight outside of city council chambers. The city has a five-member city council, and the council — not the voters — elect two council members to serve as mayor and vice mayor, the city’s website explains: Council chooses one of its own to serve as Mayor, and another to serve as Vice Mayor. Both are two-year terms. Mike Signer was elected as mayor in January 2016, and Wes Bellamy became vice mayor. The Mayor presides over meetings, calls special meetings, makes some appointments to advisory boards and serves as the ceremonial head of government. The Vice Mayor substitutes whenever the Mayor is unavailable. While the Mayor has no more power than any other Councilor, the position carries with it the ability to set the agenda. That means the Mayor can control how the meeting flows. In short, the mayor wouldn’t have the authority to order police to stand down, even if he wanted to. The second problem with claim that the mayor told Charlottesville Police to stand down is that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency, bringing in outside state resources. The Commonwealth of Virginia Emergency Operations Plan states that state agencies and local police coordinate responses to those situations, making it impossible for a mayor to single-handedly order police to stand down. For his part, Charlottesville Police Chief Al S. Thomas, Jr., defended police response to the protests. When asked if officers were told to avoid arresting protesters for fear of a violent backlash from armed protestors, Thomas responded, “That is simply not true.” Thomas said police forces became strained when protesters gathering at Emancipation Park didn’t follow police orders to go through a single point of entry. Soon after, the rally was deemed an “unlawful assembly,” and police forces were stretched thin when protestors disbursed throughout the city, the Washington Post reports: Thomas denied that his officers were intimidated by the firepower of the protesters, including the presence of militia with military-style semiautomatic rifles, but said it was prudent for them to change into riot gear before returning to confront the violence. After clearing the park, it took police about an hour to regain control of the streets, and officers begin following different groups of “mutually combative” troublemakers but did not specify who Thomas thought was ultimately responsible for initiating the violence. “It was a challenge,” he said. “We were spread thin once the groups dispersed.” So, while the police response to Charlottesville protests has been criticized, there’s no indication that police were told to stand down. That’s why we’re reporting this one as fiction. Comments
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10724
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PSA Test Cut-off Could Signal Low-Risk Prostate Cancer
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It’s little wonder that there are no independent perspectives in the story when it jumps the gun on when the data are even presented. How could anyone react when they haven’t heard or seen the data? We sympathize with the reporter asked to wrap up the teleconference presentations (virtually an audio news release) on the three studies. But the story lacked: a discussion of costs – in areas where cost implications are huge; appropriate caveats about the preliminary nature of the evidence; any discussion of potential harms from the three approaches discussed; adequte discussion of benefits; independent perspectives; comparisons with other existing approaches. There is a lot of information available about prostate cancer testing and treatment this week because of a big genitourinary cancer meeting in Florida. That doesn’t mean all the news is ready for prime time. And, for journalists who do choose to report on the meeting, it doesn’t mean that they can or should slack off on scrutinizing the evidence or providing context for readers. In fact, the situation demands it even more. Failure to do so only contributes to consumer confusion and misunderstanding.
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false
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Cancer,HealthDay,Screening
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There was no discussion about how costs might be affected by any of the three aspects of prostate cancer testing and treatment described in this story. And all three had significant cost implications. The story did an incomplete job explaining the possible benefits to patients of the various changes to prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment that were described. For example, the story reported the finding that surgeons need to perform 1,600 robotic prostatectomies before they are as proficient with the technology as they are with conventional surgery. The story went on to explain that the robotic approach ‘offers surgeons three-dimensional vision and such improvements as better magnification and hand tremor filter’ but failed to explain what advantage that conferred to the patient. Does ti improve outcomes? Does it change the rates at which side effects occur? Similarly – in detailing the potential benefit of using the medication Avodart to treat men with early stage prostate cancer, the story mentioned the relative reduction in risk of disease progression. However without knowing how often disease progression occurs, it is not possible to make an informed decision about the value in taking this medication. Using odd wording, the story says Avodart “may delay the progression of low-risk, early prostate cancer among men who choose a wait-and-see approach to treatment.” Wait-and-see means wait-and-see. The potential for harm associated with adopting any of the aspects of prostate cancer testing and treatment covered in the story were not clearly or completely discussed. For example – what are the consequences of a surgeon not being proficient with robotic surgery? What are the side effects for the medication Avodart? How often are they seen? Although the story explained that the information came from talks that were to be given at an upcoming meeting, it did not make clear that there is limited peer review that place with findings presented at meetings. So it is difficult to get independent perspectives on work that hasn’t even been presented yet – much less published. And the findings should only be considered preliminary. None of these caveats were included. The story did not engage in overt disease mongering. There do not appear to have been any independent sources used to verify the veracity of the information presented at the meeting or to provide context for the details reported. The story didn’t give any context on a number of points regarding alternatives. Each could have been addressed easily with a little re-wording or a few extra words. The story reported on three different aspects of prostate cancer testing and treatment – PSA testing, medical therapy as an adjunct to active surveillance, and data about the learning curve in the use of robots in the surgical treatment of prostate cancer. If one reads between the lines, one can infer the widespread availability of all three approaches from the story. It is possible to infer from the story what is the relative novelty of the three approaches reported on: a potential modified schedule for PSA testing; off label use of an already FDA approved medication; and new data on the learning curve for a robotic surgical approach. The story identified the teleconference that was the source of this story and it appears to be the only source of information used in this piece. At the time this story was published, the results of the studies described had not yet even been presented. So the teleconference, with only the authors presenting, is the equivalent of an audio news release. And it was the only source for this story.
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8467
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Japan health ministry projects 400,000 deaths without virus containment measures: media.
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Japan’s death toll from the novel coronavirus could reach 400,000 without measures to stem the contagion, according to a health ministry projection reported by local media.
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true
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Health News
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A ministry team studying clusters of the disease estimated that serious cases needing ventilator intervention could reach 850,000, Kyodo and the Asahi newspaper reported. The projections are based on research from Hokkaido University professor Hiroshi Nishiura, one of the infectious disease experts guiding the government’s response to the outbreak. The health ministry could not immediately confirm the report. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration has declared a state of emergency and advised citizens to curtail personal interaction by 70% to 80% to prevent an explosion in cases. Japan has had more than 8,000 cases and 162 deaths from the virus, according to the tally by national broadcaster NHK.
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29023
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A list collect passages about racism taken from Barack Obama's books.
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"Barack Obama did not write in 2006 that ""I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."""
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mixture
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Politics Politicians, barack obama, muslims
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The above-quoted e-mail forward reproduces passages taken from Barack Obama’s two books — Dreams from My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope — (2006) with the presumed intent of presenting Obama as a self-declared racist. However, these cherry-picked statements are all presented devoid of context, and some of them are either significantly reworded from the originals or outright fabrications. Below we have identified and reproduced the relevant passages in which these statements appear, with their fuller context: “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.” This statement is a rewording of a passage from page 261 of The Audacity of Hope, in which Barack Obama wrote of the importance of not allowing inflamed public opinion to result in innocent members of immigrant groups being stripped of their rights, denied their due as American citizens, or placed into confinement, as was done with Japanese-American U.S. citizens during World War II. The original contains no specific mention of “Muslims” — Obama was referring to the importance of standing up for and protecting the rights of all immigrants who have become U.S. citizens, and someone altered the wording of the passage to give it a different meaning: In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction. “I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.” This statement comes from the introduction to Dreams from My Father (p. xv), as part of a passage in which Barack Obama spoke of the difficulties of growing up as the child of mixed-race parents. The statement is actually a portion of a parenthetical remark Obama used to explain that people who did not know him well were often surprised to find that he was the child of mixed-raced parents (because he looked black, and he no longer made a point of gratuitously mentioning that his mother was white): [W]hat strikes me most when I think about the story of my family is a running strain of innocence, an innocence that seems unimaginable, even by the measures of childhood. My wife’s cousin, only six years old, has already lost such innocence. A few weeks ago he reported to his parents that some of his first grade classmates had refused to play with him because of his dark, unblemished skin. Obviously his parents, born and raised in Chicago and Gary, lost their own innocence long ago, and although they aren’t bitter — the two of them being as strong and proud and resourceful as any parents I know — one hears the pain in their voices as they begin to have second thoughts about having moved out of the city into a mostly white suburb, a move they made to protect their son from the possibility of being caught in a gang shooting and the certainty of attending an underfunded school. They know too much, we have all seen too much, to take my parents’ brief union — a black man and a white woman, an African and an American — at face value. When people who don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. “I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s race.” No such sentence (nor anything close to it) appears anywhere in either Dreams from My Father or The Audacity of Hope. This statement was taken from a March 2007 article about Barack Obama, and they are not Obama’s own words but rather those of the article’s author (recast in the first person): In reality, Obama provides a disturbing test of the best-case scenario of whether America can indeed move beyond race. He inherited his father’s penetrating intelligence; was raised mostly by his loving liberal white grandparents in multiracial, laid-back Hawaii, where America’s normal race rules never applied; and received a superb private school education. And yet, at least through age 33 when he wrote Dreams from My Father, he found solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother’s race. “There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.” This statement comes from page 142 of Dreams from My Father, as part of a passage in which Barack Obama described being interviewed by a man named Marty Kaufman (a pseudonym for Jerry Kellman) for a position as a community organizer in Chicago. Kaufman was specifically looking for a black man to work with him, because he himself was white and needed someone to help him appeal to both sides in a racially polarized city. The statement reproduced above creates a false impression by eliding the ending to the final sentence, in which Obama makes reference (in his expression of misgivings) to Kaufman’s whiteness being a problem, because Kaufman himself had said it was a problem: I had all but given up on organizing when I received a call from Marty Kaufman. He explained that he’d started an organizing drive in Chicago and was looking to hire a trainee. He’d be in New York the following week and suggested that we meet at a coffee shop on Lexington. His appearance didn’t inspire much confidence. He was a white man of medium height wearing a rumpled suit over a pudgy frame. His face was heavy with two-day-old whiskers; behind a pair of thick, wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes seemed set in a perpetual squint. As he rose from the booth to shake my hand, he spilled some tea on his shirt … He ordered more hot water and told me about himself. He was Jewish, in his late thirties, had been reared in New York. He had started organizing in the sixties with the student protests, and ended up staying with it for fifteen years. Farmers in Nebraska. Blacks in Philadelphia. Mexicans in Chicago. Now he was trying to pull urban blacks and suburban whites together around a plan to save manufacturing jobs in metropolitan Chicago. He needed somebody to work with him, he said. Somebody black. He offered to start me off at ten thousand dollars the first year, with a two-thousand-dollar travel allowance to buy a car; the salary would go up if things worked out. After he was gone, I took the long way home, along the East River promenade, and tried to figure out what to make of the man. He was smart, I decided. He seemed committed to his work. Still, there was something about him that made me wary. A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white — he’d said himself that that was a problem. “It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.” This sentence appears on page 101 of Dreams from My Father, as part of a long passage in which Barack Obama talked about his time at Occidental College in Los Angeles. It was another expression of a theme touched on in many other sections of the book — the difficulties of being expected to associate oneself with a particular racial heritage, especially for those who came from multiracial backgrounds — prompted by the example of a girl named Joyce, one of Obama’s classmates: She was a good-looking woman, Joyce was with her green eyes and honey skin and pouty lips. We lived in the same dorm my freshman year, and all the brothers were after her. One day I asked her if she was going to the Black Students’ Association meeting. She looked at me funny, then started shaking her head like a baby who doesn’t want what it sees on the spoon. “I’m not black,” Joyce said. “I’m multiracial.” Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother, who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. “Why should I have to choose between them?” she asked me. Her voice cracked, and I thought she was going to cry. “It’s not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now they’re willing to treat me like a person. No — it’s black people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose. They’re the ones who are telling me that I can’t be who I am …” They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people … To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling conventions. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But this strategy alone couldn’t provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerant. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names. “I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.” This statement is a rewording (further changing an intended meaning already obscured by a lack of context) of material from page 220 of Dreams from My Father. The material appeared as part of a passage in which Barack Obama described his profound disappointment in learning (from information provided by his half-sister, Auma) that the lofty image he had held all his life of his role model, his biological father (a man he barely knew), was a flawed and idealized one. All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader — my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn’t see what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret. Yes, I’d seen weakness in other men — Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo [my adoptive father] and his compromise. But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own — my father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man! Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by … what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!
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415
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Bloody Philippine drug war fails to curb methamphetamine supply: VP.
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Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs has only managed to curb the supply of methamphetamines by less than 1% of annual consumption, proof that it has been a bloody failure, his main political rival, the vice president, said on Monday.
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true
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Health News
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Thousands of suspected drug traffickers and users have been killed in the campaign that Duterte launched soon after he won election in 2016. Vice President Leni Robredo, who was elected separately to the president, and recently served a brief stint as the president’s drug “tsar”, said vast quantities of the highly addictive drug were available because seizures had barely dented the supply. “It is very clear, based on official data, despite the number of Filipinos killed and the budget spent, the volume of shabu supply curbed didn’t exceed 1%,” Robredo told a news conference, referring to methamphetamines. Robredo, a former human rights lawyer, has long been a critic of Duterte’s flagship anti-drugs campaign, the main focus of which has been methamphetamines. Citing police data, she said annual seizures of the drug in the last three years were in a range of about 1,000 kg, compared with estimated consumption of 3,000 kg a week, which translates to 156 tonnes a year, worth about 1.3 trillion pesos ($25 billion). The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated the Asia-Pacific methamphetamine trade was worth as much as $61.4 billion in 2018, up from an estimated $15 billion just five years earlier. Duterte appointed Robredo his “drugs tsar” on Nov. 5 after the opposition leader, in a Reuters interview and subsequent public appearances, expressed alarm about the death toll in the anti-narcotics campaign and said it needed a fresh approach. But 18 days later Duterte fired her after she had exposed flaws in the campaign. Robredo said the government must change its strategy and halt police anti-drug operations. “Instead of chasing or killing drug peddlers in street corners, we need to pursue the source of drugs, the big suppliers. They are the real enemy, not the ordinary people,” Robredo said. Responding to Robredo’s comments, presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo, said her stint as the president’s top anti-drugs official had been a failure. “The fact remains that we have dismantled so many illegal drug factories ... caused the surrender of thousands of drug addicts and pushers ... and neutralized high-value drug suspects,” Panelo said.
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4710
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In a first, Peruvian with Down syndrome runs for parliament .
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Bryan Russell has Down syndrome and does daily speech exercises, putting pens and corks in his mouth to help build up low muscle tone there. He is also waging a longshot bid to become a national Peruvian lawmaker, going door to door in Lima to ask for votes.
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true
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Caribbean, Down syndrome, Health, General News, Latin America, Campaigns, Peru, Lima
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Russell, 27, wants to use his campaign to raise awareness about people with developmental disabilities and he says he represents an alternative to the scourge of corruption in Peru that has brought down presidents and weakened democratic institutions. “I’m someone clean, honest, transparent,” Russell said in an interview with The Associated Press. He spoke while sitting next to Amor, a pet dog he rescued from the street. The purpose of politicking, he said, is to “break the paradigm” that people with Down syndrome can’t be independent. Russell may be the first person with Down syndrome to run for public office anywhere, according to the Global Down Syndrome Foundation. “We are thrilled that Bryan Russell is running for Congress in Peru,” said Michelle Sie Whitten, president and CEO of the foundation. “As far as we know, he is the first professional who has Down syndrome running for a publicly elected office, and he is showing the world that we need diversity in all areas of society including in our governments.” In 2013, Ángela Bachiller, who has Down syndrome, became a city councilor in Valladolid, Spain. But she didn’t run for election, instead taking over the post after her predecessor resigned because of corruption allegations. Down syndrome is a genetic abnormality that causes developmental delays and medical conditions such as heart defects and respiratory and hearing problems. Russell is a candidate for Peru-Nacion, a center-right party that is not widely known and has fared poorly in past elections. However, Russell’s bold campaign ahead of the Jan. 26 parliamentary elections is getting attention. He was invited to speak at a leftist forum where he asked people to fight for people like him, regardless of political leanings. “I want people with my condition to have a voice,” said Russell, who studied communications at the Peruvian San Ignacio de Loyola University and said his parents encouraged him to find his own way. “I learned how to read and write, walk, run and eat, basically to respect myself,” the candidate has written. “Well this is really impressive, because Bryan is changing the history and that is the most important thing,” said Gladys Mujica, Russell’s mother. Mujica, an English teacher, described her son as a “symbol.” Some Peruvians are open to Russell’s campaigning, which consists on a normal day of handing out leaflets while carrying a sign with an image of his face. “He’s looking to do his best. The ‘normal’ people try to steal from the country. That’s a very big difference,” said Carlos Maza, a retired man who said he would vote for Russell. “We have to give him a chance,” said Elena Saavedra, a secretary who shook the candidate’s hand. About 3 million Peruvians have some kind of disability in a country of more than 30 million, according to official figures. There is no data for the number of Peruvians with Down syndrome, though historian Liliana Peñaherrera, founder of the Peruvian Society for Down Syndrome, estimates there could be up to 25,000 people with the condition. People with Down syndrome struggle to overcome prejudices, including a perception that they are basically big children and can’t make their own decisions, said psychologist Patricia Andrade. As a result, many with Down Syndrome live on the margins of society because employers prefer to hire people with other kinds of disabilities, filling a quota of 3% and 5% in workplaces of more than 50 people. Last year, Peru changed its laws to allow people described as disabled to exercise their rights without the intervention of a representative on their behalf. Previously, they needed a guardian to marry, vote, sign a work contract, acquire a credit card and do other things. Peñaherrera welcomed Russell’s political candidacy, saying it draws attention to people who struggle against discrimination and the invisibility that society forces upon them. Still, she said, Russell should be held to the same standards as “any other politician” if he gets elected. ___ Franklin Briceño on Twitter:
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2902
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Lung cancer rates decline for U.S. men, women: study.
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The percentage of U.S. adults developing lung cancer is falling, with the sharpest declines among those aged 35 to 44, according to U.S. data released on Thursday, fifty years after the surgeon general’s first-ever report warning of the dangers of smoking.
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true
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Health News
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The lung cancer rate dropped by 2.6 percent per year among men and 1.1 percent per year among women, between 2005 and 2009, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found, using the most recent available data. The largest decline was seen in adults aged 35 to 44, with a 6.4 percent drop per year among men and a 5.9 percent decrease for women in that age group, the study said. “This is a big deal,” said Clifford Hudis, president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. But Hudis added that there is still much more work to be done to reduce smoking given all the health problems it creates in addition to lung cancer. More than half of American men and over a third of women were smokers on January 11, 1964, when Dr. Luther Terry delivered the Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health outlining the links between tobacco use, lung cancer and death. Since the surgeon general’s 1964 report, the prevalence of smoking by U.S. adults has been cut by half, the CDC said. “I’m not satisfied with reducing smoking,” Hudis said. “It should be eliminated. There’s no upside to it.” Up to 90 percent of lung cancer cases are linked to cigarette smoking and second-hand smoke, the CDC said. The CDC, whose officials call the fight to reduce tobacco use a “winnable battle,” promotes increased funding for anti-smoking campaigns. In 2007, the CDC recommended spending $3.7 billion on state-level anti-smoking campaigns. But in 2010, states spent $640 million, only 2.4 percent of the money they received from settlements in lawsuits against tobacco companies, the CDC said. More than half of American men and over a third of women were smokers on January 11, 1964, when Dr. Luther Terry delivered the first Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health outlining the links between tobacco use, lung cancer and death.
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35541
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Melinda Gates wore an upside-down cross in broadcast interviews in May 2020 to denounce Christianity.
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What's true: Based on our examination of the videos in question, Melinda Gates did wear a necklace with a pendant in the shape of a cross in interviews. What's false: According to the Church of Satan, an upside-down or inverted cross is not an official symbol of loyalty. What's undetermined: Due to the low resolution of the video footage and lack of explanation from Gates herself, it cannot be proved whether the cross had four equal arms or one longer arm. Even if the latter were true, whether the cross was intentionally (or unintentionally) flipped upside down is unknown.
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false
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Politics, COVID-19
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Melinda Gates has been a frequent target of misinformation campaigns during the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic. So it was perhaps not surprising in May 2020 when her jewelry raised new suspicions among conspiracy theorists that she — the famous philanthropist and partner to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates — had sold her “soul to the devil.” In at least three video segments with journalists that posted online between May 7 and May 11 (via Politico, Yahoo! Finance, and NBC’s “Today”), Gates criticized the U.S. federal government’s response to the pandemic under U.S. President Donald Trump and discussed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s work on finding a vaccine to build people’s immunity against COVID-19 to end the crisis. On May 8, Gates tweeted: But it did not appear to be Gates’ comments in the video interviews that sparked controversy on social media. Rather, critics fixated on her appearance. She was seen in a series of broadcast interviews wearing a pink blouse, hoop earrings, and a necklace — the latter of which conspiracy theorists believed to have displayed an upside-down or “inverted” cross that symbolized Gates’ alleged allegiance to Satan and denouncement of the Christian faith. A viral Facebook post read: Another popular post, which a YouTuber recited in a May 12 video, said: Roman Catholic Melinda Gates in an interview on TODAY Show pushing hard for a global COVID-19 vaccine was wearing a bright and shiny upside-down cross around her neck. … Who likes to wear inverted crosses? Satanists, pagans, witches, warlocks, New Agers, most people in Hollywood. The claim is two-pronged: that Gates did in fact wear an upside-down or inverted cross in video interviews, including for NBC’s “Today” show, and that an inverted cross is a symbol of Satanic worship. While unpacking the former, keep in mind that Bill and Melinda Gates have been major targets of misinformation campaigns by anti-vaccine advocates and conspiracy theorists for more than 10 years, a result of their foundation’s aggressive research to curb health disparities worldwide via vaccines, or shots that build populations’ immunity against certain viruses. Yet a new era of dubious claims involving the billionaire couple surfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic, ever since the coronavirus was first reported in humans in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. Doomsday theorists came up with the idea that the Gateses were trying to “microchip” or control world populations via a COVID-19 vaccine — a conspiracy theory that surfaced in various forms, including a doctored image that supposedly showed the words “Center for Global Human Population Reduction” inscribed on a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation building. For the jewelry claim, though, when asked by Snopes if Melinda Gates owned a necklace with an inverted cross, and if she was wearing it during the May 2020 interviews, representatives of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which handles most media requests for the couple) did not respond to the inquiry as of this writing. Upon examination of the interview footage on the “Today” show website, for example, Gates was indeed wearing a necklace that appeared to have a charm in the shape of a cross and one of the cross’ arms looked longer than the rest. But here’s what makes the answer to the claim murky: It’s unclear whether the cross pendant itself had four equilateral arms, like a Greek cross or plus sign, or if it had one longer arm like the Latin cross. For the former theory, it was possible the Greek cross included a rounded clasp to attach the pendant to the necklace chain and that clasp made one of the cross’ vertical arms appear longer than it actually was. That was the case in low-resolution photos of Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, when conspiracy theorists online raised similar questions about her cross-shaped necklace in 2018. A spokesperson for Chelsea Clinton confirmed that she, indeed, sported a “Greek Cross or an equilateral cross” around her neck on “rare occasion.” On the other hand, Gates could be wearing a Latin cross, as critics claim. If that’s the case, the next questions are these: Did she purposefully wear the cross upside down or did the charm flip unintentionally? Based on the available evidence, we cannot make that call. We can, however, provide context as to why wearing a cross pendant, even one inverted, may or may not be a statement of Gates’ ideologies. In several public statements, including a video interview with a reporter for The Guardian in 2012, Gates has identified as a follower of the Catholic Church. The reporter, for example, described Gates as a “church-going, believing Catholic” and Gates did not refute the claim. That piece of her identity could be the reason for why she wore a necklace with a cross in 2020, or not. Nonetheless, according to Catholic Answers, which defines itself as a “media ministry” that explains and defends the Catholic faith, even if Gates’ cross was upside-down, the piece of jewelry could still be a statement of her devotion to the church. Its website states: The truth of the matter is that the upside down cross (without a corpus, so not a crucifix) is an ancient symbol of St. Peter’s crucifixion. Tradition tells us that when St. Peter was martyred, he insisted that he be crucified upside down as he did not believe himself worthy to be crucified in the manner of his Lord. That said, some people believe an upside-down cross is a statement against Jesus Christ, who is revered in Christianity, and in favor of Satan. For example, a 1993 document, titled “Satanic Cult Awareness” and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice, said an upside-down cross is “blaspheme of the Christian cross” and a symbol that law enforcement and criminal justice agencies should be aware of. On page 40 of the document: But many people who call themselves Satanists reject the inverted cross as an official symbol. According to the Church of Satan, which Encyclopaedia Britannica defines as “counterculture group founded in the United States in the 1960s,” the group’s main symbol is the Sigil of Baphomet, incorporating a pentagram, a goat’s head, and Hebrew letters.
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36479
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"Nick Jr.'s ""Max & Ruby"" involves a tragic backstory: violent deaths, molestation, and traumatic brain injury."
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Do Children’s Characters ‘Max and Ruby’ Have a Tragic Backstory?
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false
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Entertainment, Fact Checks
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In 2015, the following content (archived here), an apparent Tumblr screenshot describing the purported backstory for the preschool book series and television show Max & Ruby, started to circulate on social media:Underneath a still from Max & Ruby were comments from an original poster and another person. The first said:12 years after it was first aired, the producers of Max & Ruby have finally announced the physiological aspect behind it. The reason why there are no parents is because they died in a car accident on there way to picking Ruby up from Bunny Scouts. Max was in the car at the time and survived, but suffers from serious brain injuries, hence the reason why he always messes up in the show and Ruby is the mother figure and has to look after him and fix the problems. Max is mute because their grandmother molested him at a young age and he is so traumatized that he created Super Bunny as an imaginary hero to somehow save him from his life. He plays with ambulance and police cars because the remembers those vehicles were there during the accident.The provided details were extremely dark, with Ruby’s participation in “Bunny Scouts” seemingly the entrance point for all the horror into their adorable furry lives (and it didn’t escape our notice that it’s all her fault in this rendering. )The show began airing on Nickelodeon’s Nick Jr. block of programming in 2002. In a NickJr.com interview with Max & Ruby‘s creator, creator and children’s book author Rosemary Wells says nothing about these supposed traumas endured by the bunny stars of the show:Ruby is seven and Max is three. Their relationship is based on my two kids when they were seven and three. Even though they love each other, Max and Ruby have very different ideas about everything. Max is mischievous and disorganized. Ruby is bossy, determined, and very organized. In each story Max wants one thing and Ruby wants something entirely different.As in most other classic stories, we don’t see Max and Ruby’s parents, because I believe that kids resolve their issues and conflicts differently when they are on their own. The television series gives kids a sense about how these two siblings resolve their conflicts in a humorous and entertaining way.Plus, as a September 2016 CNet article describes, the rumor was put to rest by the introduction of Max and Ruby’s rabbit elders that year:There are many unanswered questions in the cartoon world. How come Goofy can walk and talk like a human, but Pluto can’t, even though they’re both dogs? Why does “The Jetsons” theme song do nothing but recite the family’s names? How could Wile E. Coyote afford all those Acme products? And where are Max & Ruby’s parents?That last question was answered [in 2016], when Nickelodeon aired two new episodes of animated kids’ show “Max & Ruby” that finally, after five full seasons and 14 years, actually showed the two bunnies’ parents.Although the title of the piece was “Hoppy news: Cartoon bunnies Max and Ruby’s parents aren’t dead after all,” it made no reference to any claims to the contrary in its reporting. Its title likely referenced the well-worn trope most associated with Disney films in which horribly orphaned or abandoned children are the norm.A September 2014 E! News article (“The Tragic Reason Why Disney Movies Rarely Have Mother Characters”) points to an interview with a tenured Disney producer on the exceptionally high maternal mortality rate in those works:At this point, most Disney fans know that if they are sitting down to watch a Disney movie on a Friday night with a glass of red wine and their cats sleeping next to them (ugh, that sounds so amazing we wish we were doing that right now), they know that they’ll either be watching characters who lose their parents, or who just simply don’t have any. It’s a Disney thing. […]In a revealing interview with Glamour, longtime Disney producer Don Hahn gave his two theories on why there are rarely any parents, or more specifically, mom characters in Disney films. One theory comes from a practical stand point, but the other theory stems from a truly tragic story from Walt Disney’s past.After surmising the circumstances may be no more than a well-worn narrative device, Hahn is quoted directly on a second theory:But this next theory about the lack of motherly characters is positively heartbreaking, and it comes from a little-known story about the man behind the magic: Walt Disney himself.“The other reason—and this is really odd—Walt Disney, in the early 1940s, when he was still living at this house, also bought a house for his mom and dad to move into. He had the studio guys come over and fix the furnace, but when his mom and dad moved in, the furnace leaked and his mother died. The housekeeper came in the next morning and pulled his mother and father out on the front lawn. His father was sick and went to the hospital, but his mother died. He never would talk about it, nobody ever does. He never spoke about that time because he personally felt responsible because he had become so successful that he said, ‘Let me buy you a house.’ It’s every kid’s dream to buy their parents a house and just through a strange freak of nature—through no fault of his own—the studio workers didn’t know what they were doing.”….”That idea that he really contributed to his mom’s death was really tragic. If you dig, you can read about it. It’s not a secret within their family, but it’s just a tragedy that is so difficult to even talk about. It helps to understand the man a little bit more. He had just made Fantasia, Dumbo, Pinocchio, Bambi, and Snow White in a five-year span. He buys a house for his mom and dad, they move down from Oregon, and his mom dies. Again, I’m not a psychologist to know it all, but it’s a really interesting story. To me, it humanizes Walt. He was devastated by that, as anyone would be.”The claim that the titular characters in Max & Ruby had a tragic recent past leaned on pop culture awareness of orphaned Disney characters and a roster of complex backstories on shows like Sesame Street (which is known for its inclusion of storylines featuring autism, homelessness, AIDS, and parental incarceration) to suggest that the Nick Jr. bunnies also had a history of trauma.However, while claims that Max & Ruby was set against a backdrop involving a gruesome post-Bunny Scouts accident, molestation, and traumatic brain injury looked potentially legitimate due to the use of weightier themes in other preschool programming, they didn’t hold water. No element of the show involved Max or Ruby overcoming any of these purported struggles described, and most tellingly of all, their parents eventually were introduced as characters on the show.
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724
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Zimbabwe doctors say receiving death threats over strike.
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Striking Zimbabwean doctors said on Wednesday they were being threatened with death and suspected state security agents were pressuring them after police blocked their second protest march over the disappearance of their union leader.
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true
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Health News
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Peter Magombeyi, president of the Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association (ZHDA) and one organizer of an ongoing strike to demand higher wages for state doctors because of soaring living costs, disappeared on Saturday night. ZHDA represents junior and middle level doctors at public hospitals. “As health professionals we are being threatened by security elements. Both nurses and doctors are regularly being told that resisting what the government offers them will result in their death,” according to a doctors petition to parliament. “Evidence of the threats is available in audio and text messages,” the petition said without giving more details. Police said they could not immediately comment. Edric Nhema, secretary general for the country’s nurses union who was part of the salary negotiating team with Magombeyi, told doctors at Parirenyatwa Hospital before the march that he had received death threats from unknown people. State security minister Owen Ncube said in a statement that the government was treating Magombeyi’s case as a disappearance and not an abduction as alleged by the doctor’s colleagues. He said the timing of Magombeyi’s disappearance, ahead of the United Nations annual meeting next week and at a time a U.N. special rapporteur on human rights was in Zimbabwe, pointed to work by a “third force” meant to tarnish the country’s image. Dozens of riot police blocked more than 200 doctors on Wednesday as they marched to parliament to present their petition chanting “no Peter, no work”. Two years after President Emmerson Mnangagwa and the army conspired to oust longtime ruler Robert Mugabe, people are suffering from triple-digit inflation that has eroded salaries and shortages of basic goods like fuel and electricity. Human rights groups say they have recorded more than 20 cases of abductions of activists by state security agents since January. The government denies any involvement. Churches under the Zimbabwe Heads of Christian Denominations (ZHOCD) groups said they were worried that after many reported cases of abduction, no one had been arrested. “This has put the security of citizens at the highest level of vulnerability,” ZHOCD said in a statement, adding that Mnangagwa should publicly condemn abductions and torture of civilians.
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4333
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Global Fund raises $13.92 billion to fight AIDS, TB, malaria.
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An organization that funds programs to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria raised at least $13.92 billion for the next three years at an international conference, French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday.
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true
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Bill Gates, Malaria, Emmanuel Macron, General News, Entertainment, France, Africa, Health, Bono, Tuberculosis, Celebrities, Europe
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The Global Fund said after the conference that Macron, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Bono of the rock band U2 “committed to raise at least a further $100 million during the replenishment period to achieve a total of over $14 billion” - the organization’s goal for its conference in France. The last Global Fund conference brought in $12.2 billion in 2016. To give a boost toward this year’s target, France increased its pledge to $1.42 billion, $60 million more than previously announced, Macron said. “We are absolutely thrilled,” Global Fund Executive Director Peter Sands said at a news conference. “With these resources, we can step up the fight.” A dozen heads of state and government, mostly from African countries, attended the two-day event in the French city of Lyon. During his speech, Macron mistakenly detailed the amounts in euros. The French presidency later said he was actually speaking in dollars. The U.S. Congress approved a commitment to give of $4.68 billion over three years, about a third of the overall total. The United States and France are the Global Fund’s biggest public donors. Britain, Germany, Canada and the European Union increased their pledges, too, while private donors pledged more than $1 billion. The donations from governments, philanthropic donors and the private sector will finance health programs in more than 100 countries, the fund said. Major recipients of the fund are Nigeria, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The Global Fund said the money would help save as many as 16 million lives, avert 234 million infections and try to get back on track to end HIV, tuberculosis and malaria as epidemics by 2030. The organization said the programs it has supported since its creation in 2002 have saved 32 million lives.
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38838
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A man who spent six days in a coma after an attack awoke speaking ancient Hebrew and has no recollection of his former life.
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Amnesiac Wakes From Coma Speaking Only Ancient Hebrew
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false
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Health / Medical
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A fake news website is behind this hoax. The fictional story of a 53-year-old California man who awoke from a coma speaking only ancient Hebrew first appeared at the fake news website World News Daily Report: The man was found unconscious in a California motel on August 9. He had with him a duffel bag of exercise clothes, a backpack and tennis rackets. He carried a California identification card and a Social Security card, both identifying him as Jamal Miller. When he woke up in the Cedars-Sinai hospital days later, he had no memory of his past and could only speak in an unknown language. For three days, the puzzle remained complete until a rabbi visiting a friend in a nearby room, identified the tongue as ancient Hebrew and was able to communicate with the poor man. The fake report said that the man suffered from “foreign language syndrome,” which occurs when a person speaks a new language after suffering a brain injury. Foreign language syndrome isn’t a legitimate medical condition, but the idea of it got a lot of attention back in 2010 when a Slavic girl allegedly awoke from a coma speaking fluent German, not her native Croatian language. The tale is true, but the girl had actually studied German before her injury, the blog site Neurologica explains: Now the interesting part is that after she woke up from the coma she could speak German a lot more fluently than before and not a word in Croatian. My guess is that Sepsis caused a brain damage in left temporal lobe. Probably mostly in Broca’s Area, thus disabling her in speaking Croatian but not damaging her knowledge of German language. At that point her brain probably switched to best alternative and her passive knowledge of German sprang to life. Without possibility to fall back to Croatian vocabulary there is no dilemma in which words to choose and how to use them so her German must have sounded a lot better to doctors and her parents. So, short of a miracle, there’s no way that a person could wake up speaking fluent ancient Hebrew after a brain injury if they had never studied the language before. Comments
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1480
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Igor the Siberian tiger gets stem-cell hip treatment in Hungary.
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Igor, a Siberian tiger in a Hungarian zoo, received stem-cell joint treatment on Wednesday which doctors hoped would help heal its hip and allow it to live happily, on less medicine.
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true
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Science News
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Igor is a 13-year old tiger living in the zoo in the southern Hungarian town of Szeged. It has been suffering from hip joint pains for years. The treatment, used more widely on humans than animals, cures injured joints with tissue taken from patients’ own fatty tissue, which contains regenerative stem cells, doctors said. These are injected back into the ailing joints. “The essence of stem-cell treatment is that we can achieve an improvement in the quality of life of patients who cannot be helped by operations or medical treatment,” said Robert Gippert, the veterinarian who operated on Igor’s hip. “Just like in humans, the worn out joint of Igor the tiger will heal due to the regenerative and self-healing effects of stem cells, without the use of external materials,” he added. The sedated tiger was lying peacefully on its side on the operating table, with its big paws sticking out from below a green blanket. After Igor wakes up, it could take two to three weeks before vets can judge the improvement in its movement.
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12918
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"Nancy Pelosi Says Neil Gorsuch ""comes down on the side of felons over gun safety."
|
"Pelosi said Gorsuch ""comes down on the side of felons over gun safety."" There’s one case, Games-Perez, where Gorsuch wouldn’t immediately send the defendant, a felon, to prison for having a gun, despite the federal ban on felons possessing guns. But Gorsuch’s reasoning wasn’t about whether the law infringed on the defendant’s Second Amendment rights. Instead, he thought the law allowed the defendant an opportunity to make the case in court that the he didn’t know he was a felon. Two other cases that came up in our research, Pope and Reese, turned out to be irrelevant. Pelosi’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression."
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false
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National, Criminal Justice, Crime, Supreme Court, Guns, Nancy Pelosi,
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"President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee favors felons over gun safety, says House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Pelosi said nominee Neil Gorsuch has ruled against liberal positions on a litany of issues like employee rights, food and water safety, reproductive rights and guns. Gorsuch is a conservative federal judge for the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Denver. ""If you care about that for your children, he's not your guy,"" Pelosi said during a Jan. 31 town hall on CNN. ""(Former Democratic Rep.) Gabby Giffords' group, the group for responsible solutions relating to gun safety, said that he comes down on the side of felons over gun safety."" Pelosi’s claim that Gorsuch ""comes down on the side of felons over gun safety"" caught our attention. Her office sent us a press release that Giffords’ gun control advocacy group, Americans for Responsible Solutions, put out along with the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. ""In his time on the 10th Circuit, (Gorsuch) made repeated efforts to weaken the federal law that’s prohibited felons from possessing guns for the past 50 years, a law that has saved thousands of lives and enjoys near-unanimous support among Americans and elected officials on both sides of the aisle,"" wrote Robyn Thomas, the law center’s executive director. It’s fair to assume that Gorsuch takes a right-leaning approach to the Second Amendment; the National Rifle Association supports him. But it’s misleading to say Gorsuch’s past rulings demonstrate that he thinks more felons should be allowed guns than what is already permitted under the law. Games-Perez The primary case in question is United States vs. Games-Perez. The defendant, Miguel Games-Perez, was a convicted felon, and he possessed a gun — an apparent violation of the federal law that bans felons from knowingly possessing guns. (Remember the word ""knowingly."") Games-Perez, however, wanted to make the case that he shouldn’t be convicted for this offense because he didn’t know he was a felon. He said that the state trial judge who ruled on the prior crime (the felony) repeatedly suggested to Games-Perez that he wasn’t being convicted of a felony but instead a lesser charge. In line with precedent, the 10th Circuit denied Games-Perez’s request. But Gorsuch disagreed. Gorsuch said he believes the federal law is written in such a way that a defendant must have both knowledge of being a felon and knowledge of possessing a gun in order to be convicted. Thus, Games-Perez should have the opportunity to make his case in court. If it’s decided that Games-Perez really didn’t know he was a felon, he shouldn’t go to prison on this charge. The upshot is that Gorsuch’s opinion did not say felons should be allowed guns or that the law violates the Second Amendment. It said a defendant who didn’t know he was breaking the law should have the chance to make his case in court instead of going straight to prison. He did, though, make the point that this is especially important in this case because possessing a gun is a constitutionally protected right. While this case has a gun component, Pelosi’s claim has it ""quite backwards because I don’t think Gorsuch’s opinion is about guns. For him, it’s about treating people fairly before sending them to prison,"" said Eric Citron, a partner at Goldstein & Russell who profiled Gorsuch for SCOTUSblog, and a self-described liberal. In theory, if courts adopted Gorsuch’s interpretation of this law, it could marginally weaken the federal law because some people charged with possessing a gun as a felon might successfully convince a jury they didn’t know they were felons and thus not go to prison for that offense. But it doesn’t change the fact that felons are not allowed to possess guns, and people generally know whether they’ve been convicted of a felony. Adam Skaggs, litigation director for the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, emphasized the fact that Gorsuch’s reading of the statute deviated from the majority of justices on the panel, as well as other federal courts. And if Gorsuch’s opinion were to be adopted, ""The immediate effect is to create the possibility that this guy would be back on the street,"" Skaggs said. Reese Gorsuch’s 2014 decision in United States vs. Reese has also been cited against Gorsuch. But it takes a tremendous leap of logic to view this decision as an attempt to rethink the federal ban on gun possession by felons. In this case, a court had convicted defendant James Reese of being a felon in possession of a firearm. But Reese appealed the decision to the 10th Circuit and won because the state of New Mexico had restored his civil rights. If a felon’s civil rights have been restored under state law — including the right to vote, serve on a jury, hold public office and own firearms under state law — federal law allows the felon to legally own a gun. The 10th Circuit’s decision was uncontroversial. The opinion was unanimous and written in just 300 words. Even the government attorneys who brought the original charges conceded ""that Mr. Reese’s federal firearms conviction is unsustainable."" Had the court come to a different conclusion, it would have been ""appalling,"" said Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, who clerked on the Supreme Court with Gorsuch. Pope We won’t spend much time on this third case, United States vs. Pope. We wanted to note, though, that here, Gorsuch had the opportunity to address the question: Is there a situation in which the federal ban on gun possession by people with domestic violence convictions is unconstitutional? Here, he intentionally chose not to answer the constitutional question. Instead, he relied on procedural rules to affirm a grand jury’s decision to charge the defendant, convicted of domestic abuse, with violating the federal ban. Rule of law Volokh and Citron both noted a touch of irony: In both Games-Perez and Reese, Gorsuch advocated in favor of a big-picture principle generally associated with liberals more so than conservatives: defending the rights of criminal defendants. This is an area where the late Justice Antonin Scalia, whose seat Gorsuch might fill, found common ground with liberals, too. ""This is a standard liberal position historically,"" Volokh said. ""It’s a standard rule-of-law conservative position, as well. The criticism of (Gorsuch) for this is misplaced."" Skaggs sees it differently. He said Gorsuch is willing to ""bend over backwards"" to make rulings outside the mainstream opinion on the law banning felons from owning guns, noting that it’s important to consider whether Gorsuch would advocate for criminal defendants’ rights in the same manner in cases that don’t involve guns. Our ruling Pelosi said Gorsuch ""comes down on the side of felons over gun safety."" There’s one case, Games-Perez, where Gorsuch wouldn’t immediately send the defendant, a felon, to prison for having a gun, despite the federal ban on felons possessing guns. But Gorsuch’s reasoning wasn’t about whether the law infringed on the defendant’s Second Amendment rights. Instead, he thought the law allowed the defendant an opportunity to make the case in court that the he didn’t know he was a felon. Two other cases that came up in our research, Pope and Reese, turned out to be irrelevant. Pelosi’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression."
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7045
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Nobel peace winners demand action against sex abuse.
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One of the winners of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize says the attention the prize has drawn to sexual violence against women in war zones must be followed by action against the abuses.
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true
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Nadia Murad, Denis Mukwege, International News, Norway, Africa, Health, Nobel Prizes, Iraq, Europe
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Dr. Denis Mukwege spoke Sunday at a news conference with Nadia Murad of Iraq, with whom he shared the 9-million Swedish kronor ($1 million) prize. Mukwege was honored for his work helping sexually abused women at the hospital he founded in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Murad, a Yazidi, won for her advocacy for sex abuse victims after being kidnapped by Islamic State militants. “What we see during armed conflicts is that women’s bodies become battlefields and this cannot be acceptable during our time,” Mukwege said, speaking through a translator. “We cannot only denounce it, we now need to act.” Murad, 25, was one of an estimated 3,000 girls and women from Iraq’s Yazidi minority group who were kidnapped in 2014 by IS militants and sold into sexual slavery. She was raped, beaten and tortured before managing to escape three months later. After getting treatment in Germany, she chose to speak to the world about the horrors faced by Yazidi women, despite regardless of the heavy stigma in her culture surrounding rape. She said Sunday it was difficult “for a girl, a woman, to rise up to say that these atrocities have happened.” Mukwege, a 63-year-old surgeon, founded a hospital in the city of Bukavu and over the past 20 years has treated countless women who were raped amid fighting between armed groups seeking to control of some the central African nation’s vast mineral wealth. He expressed concern Sunday that new violence could be coming as Congo holds a general election this month. “We think the conflict might blow up around this electoral period and women and children are always the first victims of such conflicts,” he said. Along with preventing sexual violence, more effort is needed to attend to victims, Mukwege said. “We need to realize that any woman who is a victim of sexual violence within her own country — such women should be allowed treatment and it’s not only medical treatment, also psychological treatment, judicial treatment,” he said. Murad said the psychological burden of her ordeal and her subsequent work is heavy. “I don’t want to live in fear. For the last four years I have been in Germany, in a safe place, but yet I’m living frightfully,” she said. “I’m scared that these people will not just attack me or have an impact on me, but with anybody else.” Murad and Mukwege will receive their prize Monday at a ceremony in the Norwegian capital. The winners of Nobel prizes for medicine, physics, chemistry and economics will get their prizes Monday in Stockholm. No Nobel literature winner was named this year due to turmoil in the Swedish Academy, which chooses the literature winners. ___ Jim Heintz in Moscow contributed to this story
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1672
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U.S. aims to crack down on 'novelty' motorcycle helmets.
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U.S. transportation regulators on Wednesday called for stronger rules for motorcycle helmets, proposing additional safety requirements in an effort to crack down on “novelty” helmets that do not meet federal standards.
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true
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Health News
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The Department of Transportation said such uncertified helmets are unsafe and do not protect riders in crashes despite being sold and marketed for use on the road. Its proposal would further define what makes an acceptable motorcycle helmet, from its thickness to its compression ability, in an attempt to help riders and state law enforcement officials identify inferior helmets. Such proposed changes aim “to reduce fatalities and injuries resulting from traffic accidents involving use of motorcycle helmets” that fail to meet federal standards, Department of Transportation regulators said. Deaths stemming from motorcycle crashes are disproportionately high, they said, in part due to the high number of motorcyclists wearing substandard helmets. Novelty helmets generally cover a smaller area of the head, have thin liners and lack the ability to absorb the force of a crash, the department said. They are often sold with disclaimers stating that they are not for highway use “yet they are sold to highway users and used in great numbers by motorcyclists,” the regulators said. It is not clear why so many riders use inferior helmets, but part of the problem seems to be that riders do not understand the risks, the regulators said. Novelty helmets can also be cheaper and appear “more comfortable or stylish,” they added. Tougher standards will help authorities prosecute sellers of noncompliant helmets in states where helmets are mandatory, regulators said. Just three of the 50 U.S. states - Illinois, Iowa and New Hampshire - do not require motorcycle riders to wear helmets, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit research group. The public can comment on the proposal for 60 days before the department moves to issue its final regulation.
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16126
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"Reince Priebus Says Barack Obama has ""the worst record of any president when it comes to putting America deeper in debt."
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"Priebus said Obama has ""the worst record of any president when it comes to putting America deeper in debt."" On Obama’s watch, debt as a share of GDP rose far faster than it did during any prior presidency. But if you look at the current amount of debt compared to where he started, the rise was not as fast as it was under Reagan and the elder Bush, two Republican predecessors. And while presidents bear some responsibility for debt accumulation, much of the equation -- economic and demographic changes and the consequences of prior president’s actions, in particular -- is out of their control. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details."
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mixture
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National, Debt, History, Reince Priebus,
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"Public concern about America’s debt load tends to wax and wane, but it never really goes away. Recently, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, brought up the national debt again, right around the time the broadest measure of national debt broke through the $18 trillion barrier for the first time. On Dec. 2, 2014, Priebus said that President Barack Obama has ""the worst record of any president when it comes to putting America deeper in debt,"" according to an account in The Hill newspaper. He went on to call the growth in debt ""immoral"" and said voters had ""tired of Democrats’ free-spending ways."" We wondered how accurate it was for Priebus to describe Obama as having ""the worst record of any president when it comes to putting America deeper in debt."" (While the Obama administration has touted its success in helping shrink the annual federal deficit, Priebus was clearly referencing debt, not the deficit, even though the two are obviously related.) When we checked with the RNC, spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski said the gross federal debt -- the amount of debt held by the public plus the amount of debt held by government entities -- had risen from $10.6 trillion to about $18 trillion during Obama’s time in office, making it the largest increase in raw dollars during any presidency. Meanwhile, she added, the subset of debt that’s held by the public has more than doubled under Obama. When we looked into these numbers, they checked out. However, given the snowballing effect of inflation and debt accumulation, it’s not surprising that whoever the most recent president is -- Republican or Democrat -- would experience the biggest increases in raw dollars of debt. So we looked at two other measurements that give a better sense of context for how much the debt climbed under Obama. We used the Treasury Department’s daily database of federal debt, called Debt to the Penny, for data going back to 1993. For earlier presidencies, we used historical data from the Office of Management and Budget. We decided to use the broader measure of gross debt rather than the narrower measure of public debt -- even though both are valid measures of debt -- because for the past three presidents, data on gross debt is more consistently accessible. Meanwhile, to limit the impact of irregular presidential tenures, we looked at nine presidential periods of either four or eight years each: Eisenhower; Kennedy and Johnson combined; Nixon and Ford combined; Carter; Reagan; George H.W. Bush; Clinton; George W. Bush; and Obama. (We didn't go further back than Eisenhower because the high debt levels in the World War II era were a historical anomaly.) Debt as a share of GDP The first measure we looked at was growth in debt as a percentage of gross domestic product, or GDP. Experts say this is an important yardstick because it gives a sense of how burdensome the debt is on the economy. Smaller economies can sustain smaller debt loads; bigger ones can tolerate bigger debt loads. Using this measure, Priebus has a point. The Obama years rank first -- that is to say, worst -- among the nine presidential tenures when measured by the increase in debt as a share of GDP. At the end of fiscal year 2008, around the time Obama took office, gross federal debt accounted for 67.7 percent of GDP. The estimate for fiscal year 2014 is 103.2 percent. That’s a 35.5 percentage-point increase over six years -- far higher than any prior president we looked at, even those who served for a full eight years. (The end of fiscal 2008 was a few months before Obama took office -- a fact that has caused us headaches in the past -- but in this case, the gap is so wide that the discrepancy doesn’t make a significant difference.) So big is the gap between Obama and the other presidents, in fact, that only three of the other eight tenures we studied saw any increase at all in debt as a share of GDP. Debt as a share of GDP went up by 18 percentage points under Reagan, by 12.3 points under George W. Bush, and by 11.7 percentage points under George H.W. Bush. By contrast, every other president or combined presidential tenure saw a decline in the share of debt within GDP. Under Carter it went down by 2.6 points, under Nixon and Ford it fell by 5.9 points, under Clinton it fell by 6.8 points, under Kennedy and Johnson it was down by 13.3 points, and under Eisenhower it fell by 18.2 percentage points. Percentage increase in debt from inauguration to end of tenure However -- if you use a second measure, the numbers are more favorable toward Obama. We looked at how much the gross debt grew from day one of the presidency to the end of that presidency, then adjusted for the length of time in office. On this list, the debt under Obama grew at the third-fastest pace -- and, awkwardly for Priebus, the two presidents under whom debt grew faster were both Republicans. Reagan saw the biggest percentage increase in debt on his watch, at about 23 percent per year, followed by George H.W. Bush at about 13 percent per year and Obama at 11.5 percent per year. Those who saw slower debt growth than Obama were Carter (an increase of 11 percent a year), George W. Bush (10.8 percent a year), Nixon and Ford (8.8 percent a year), Clinton (4.6 percent per year), Kennedy and Johnson (3.3 percent per year), and Eisenhower (1.5 percent per year). So, whether Obama ranks as ""the worst"" at debt accumulation depends on how you measure it. Who gets the blame? Another important factor to consider: How much is Obama responsible for this increase in debt? Presidents do have an impact on the debt accrued during their tenure, but that impact is not all-encompassing. Presidents propose budgets and sign off, along with Congress, on final spending and revenue numbers. Programs they initiate cost money and, unless enough other spending is cut to produce a surplus, debt inevitably goes up. In addition, debt tends to rise particularly quickly during recessions -- and Obama came into office with a doozy of a recession under way. In the debt per GDP measure, Obama was hit coming and going, since the numerator (debt) rose even as the denominator (GDP) fell during the recession. ""Certainly the Great Recession had a big impact"" on debt accumulation under Obama, said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. The recession, he said, meant both higher spending (on programs to aid the newly jobless and financially struggling) but also a loss in tax revenue (as once-employed Americans stopped earning wages they would have to pay taxes on). In addition, the Baby Boomer generation retired in increasing numbers under Obama, meaning both higher spending and fewer tax revenues. ""So it’s a mixed bag, and all presidents are a bit trapped by their time,"" Ellis said. ""Did Reagan-Bush policies help create the surpluses experienced under Clinton? Republicans say so. Did the George W. Bush policies create the economic downturn that sent the debt soaring under Obama? Democrats say yes. Ultimately, all presidents are impacted by their predecessors’ policies and can be roiled by external forces."" This suggests that Obama bears some responsibility for the rise in debt, but hardly all. Our ruling Priebus said Obama has ""the worst record of any president when it comes to putting America deeper in debt."" On Obama’s watch, debt as a share of GDP rose far faster than it did during any prior presidency. But if you look at the current amount of debt compared to where he started, the rise was not as fast as it was under Reagan and the elder Bush, two Republican predecessors. And while presidents bear some responsibility for debt accumulation, much of the equation -- economic and demographic changes and the consequences of prior president’s actions, in particular -- is out of their control. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details, so"
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6347
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Test shows donated blood positive for West Nile virus.
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Donated blood from a Detroit-area resident has tested positive for the mosquito-borne West Nile virus.
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true
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Pontiac, Blood donation, Health, General News, Detroit, West Nile virus
|
The Oakland County health department says it was notified of the positive test by state health officials. The health department says Thursday it’s the first blood donation in 2019 that has tested positive for the virus in Oakland County. West Nile virus primarily is transmitted to humans through the bites of infected mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are infected with the virus by biting infected birds. Older people are vulnerable, especially if they have other health problems. Most people who become infected will not develop any symptoms, but some become sick three to 15 days after exposure.
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7187
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Washington Senate approves universal health care work group.
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The Washington Senate has passed a bill that would create a work group to study how universal health care could work in the state.
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true
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Legislature, Health care reform, Washington, Universal health care, Business, Bills
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The measure, which was the last bill taken up by the chamber before a key floor deadline Wednesday, passed on a 28-21 vote. It now heads to the House for consideration. Several groups would be included in the work group, including the public, community health advocates, businesses, health care providers, and state officials. The group would be tasked with determining how best to implement universal health care, and studying options for increasing coverage and access, options to expand health care purchasing in collaboration with neighboring states, and options on how to pay for such a system. The group would report its recommendations to the Legislature by Nov. 15, 2020.
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3900
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Japan empress turns 56, still recovering her mental health.
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Japanese Empress Masako, still recovering from stress-induced mental health issues, said Monday she was happy to have completed her duties as part of Emperor Naruhito’s enthronement rituals and pledged to keep up the work and help her husband more for the happiness of the people.
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true
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Stress, Mental health, International News, General News, Birthdays, Health, Japan, Asia Pacific, Naruhito
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In a palace statement marking her 56th birthday, Masako thanked people who have warmly welcomed the couple after Naruhito succeeded to the throne on May 1, following his father’s abdication. “Many smiley faces I’ve seen in many places are precious memories for me and they will be my big moral support as I move forward,” the statement said. A Harvard-educated former diplomat, Masako had been largely absent from public appearances for years. She developed adjustment disorder, a condition marked by depression and other stress-induced symptoms, after giving birth to the couple’s only child, Princess Aiko, and facing pressure to have a son to continue Japan’s male-only imperial succession. Naruhito’s succession rituals spanned from late April to early December, and Masako was seen smiling and seemed healthy at her public appearances. Her her doctors welcomed her accomplishment as a positive sign, but cautioned the people against raising their expectations too high, saying that could interfere with her recovery. Masako’s long absence from imperial events and trips had raised concern that she could do even part of the work done by hugely popular former Empress Michiko. But she accompanied Naruhito at all events, including his first public greeting as emperor when some 140,000 people gathered. She sat next to Naruhito in an open car during a royal parade in November, enthusiastically waving to 119,000 well-wishers on the roadside, and she was seen overwhelmed with emotion and wiping tears with a handkerchief. Masako thanked Naruhito for his consideration and support for her and said that she hoped to further improve her health so she can give him more support. “I hope to fulfill my duty as Empress, while trying to further improve my health so that I can help His Majesty and work for the people’s happiness, together with him,” the statement released by the Imperial Household Agency said. Her doctors said Masako has been able to expand her activities and regained confidence little by little as she constantly sought ways to maintain her health while taking care of her daughter, Princess Aiko. Warm welcome from the people also gave her encouragement. But the doctors say she managed to complete her duties related to the enthronement ceremonies because of her strong sense of responsibility, not because she had fully recovered. “We believe it’s desirable” that she was able to expand her activity, the doctors said in a statement that was also released by the palace. “But she has not fully recovered and her conditions have ups and downs. She gets tired after a major event or after a series of events,” the doctors said. “Having over-expectations could go counter to her recovery.” The doctors said it is important for Masako to continue her treatment while obtaining understanding and support from around her. “We hope you will continue to warmly watch over her recovery,” they said. There are expectations that Naruhito — who is Japan’s first emperor with a college degree and who studied at Oxford — and Masako will internationalize the imperial household. Many Japanese were particularly impressed when she and Naruhito casually chatted with President Donald Trump and first lady Melania without interpreters during their visit in late May as first state guests of the new emperor. The royal couple also freely conversed many foreign dignitaries who attended state banquets and tea parties to celebrate Naruhito’s enthronement in October. As a former diplomat, Masako expressed concerns about global issues, including marine plastic pollution, poverty, child abuse and people in the conflicts-torn areas. She mourned for the death of Tetsu Nakamura, a Japanese doctor and aid worker who was gunned down in Afghanistan last week.
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2236
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Most northern China cities fail to meet winter smog targets: data.
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A majority of 39 northern Chinese cities have failed to meet anti-pollution targets over the six-months to end-March, a Reuters study of official data showed, adding to fears the war on smog has lost momentum.
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true
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Environment
|
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang declared a “war on pollution” in 2014 and the government has spent billions of yuan to bolster monitoring and enforcement, raised industrial standards and shut thousands of small “backward” enterprises. But Reuters calculations based on online monitoring data show 30 out of 39 cities in the key northern pollution control zones of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and the Fenwei Plain failed to meet air quality targets over the autumn-winter period to end-March, despite imposing special restrictions. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday, but it has already warned that momentum had slowed as a result of a slowing economy in some regions. The cities were under pressure to cut concentrations of hazardous airborne particles known as PM2.5 by around 3 percent year on year, with some targeted to make bigger reductions. Official data shows big improvements in air quality in March, with average PM2.5 readings falling 29 percent to an average of 52 micrograms per cubic meter in the 39 cities. But over the six-month period, concentrations rose 6 percent to 82 micrograms, more than double the national standard of 35 micrograms. PM2.5 actually increased in 24 cities, with central China’s Henan province performing especially badly. The Henan steel city of Anyang was the worst performer, with PM2.5 rising 27 percent to 111 micrograms. Residents blamed the weather and the city’s position downwind from large steel bases in neighboring Hebei province. “The key thing is that Anyang has the strictest pollution controls of all ... but it ranks the worst for air quality,” Li Xianzhong, co-owner of the privately-owned Xinyuan Iron and Steel Corporation, told Reuters. The capital Beijing was one of eight cities to meet its targets. It was ordered only to “improve” from last year and saw average PM2.5 fall by 3 percent, thanks to a cut of 39 percent in March. The environment ministry has vowed not to relent in fighting pollution and will implement special restrictions from October. It also said it would not tolerate attempts by local governments to blame slowing growth on tougher environmental rules. But in a sign China was trying to avoid economic disruptions, ministry spokesman Liu Youbin told a briefing last week that China would not allow overzealous officials to shut large swathes of industry. “We will resolutely oppose anyone using environmental protection as an excuse to perform simplistic and crude actions such as the emergency closure of business operations,” he said.
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37849
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"The recommendation to wear masks to prevent COVID-19 has been ""debunked."
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Facebook Fact-Checking Platform Dangerously Labels Mask Meme ‘False,’ Discourages Use of Masks Against Expert Guidelines
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false
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Disinformation, Fact Checks
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In May 2020 — in the middle of a global COVID-19 pandemic — a screenshot of a dangerously misapplied Facebook fact-checking flag began circulating which falsely and dangerously contradicts best practices around the use of masks in public places:The MemeWe spotted the above screenshot circulating in the wild. The left side shows the meme, which consists of three sets of two people. In the first set, a person labeled “Covid-19 Carrier” is not wearing a mask, and an arrow points to a masked person labeled “Contagion Probability %70.” In the second set, “Covid-19 Carrier” on the left is masked, and the second unmasked person is labeled “Contagion Probability %5.”In the third and final set, both “Covid-19 Carrier” and the other person (“Contagion Probability %1.5”) are masked. At the bottom, text read: “WEAR IT.”The meme had what seemed to be specific and easy to understand points:On the right side of the screenshot, the meme is seen beneath a Facebook-generated fact-check initiative flag reading “False information” and “Checked by independent fact-checkers,” as well as “See Why.” Underneath that, large text reads: “Conclusion: False,” and “The primary claims in the information are factually inaccurate.”As the screenshot above implied, and those spreading it reiterated, Facebook’s fact-checking flag suggested that the meme’s claims about masks were “false” because its “primary claims” were “factually inaccurate.” To reiterate our point, its primary claims were that when those who are infected and those who are not both wear masks, the spread of COVID-19 is curtailed.The Facebook Fact-CheckOn May 4 2020, Indian website Newsbreak.in published a fact-check with the following headline: “Does wearing masks reduce COVID-19 transmission probability to 1.5%? Here’s the truth.” In total, the fact-check clocked in at 211 words. Of those 211 words, here is the gist:We fact-checked the above information and found it to be unsubstantiated and false. To begin with, the infographic does not mention the source of this information. We then checked the WHO website for recommendations on wearing a mask and found that a healthy person is only advised to wear a mask if they are taking care of a COVID-19 affected patient.Although Facebook labeled the meme as false, the post actually concluded:Hence, the infographic remains unsubstantiated and although authorities globally have encouraged wearing masks while stepping out during the pandemic, there is no scientific evidence that it will reduce the transmission rate to 1.5%.In other words, the issue with the meme was not that wearing coverings over the nose and mouth reduces transmission of respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19; it was that they were unable to substantiate that the exact number was legitimate. That means that there is also no evidence the specific figure of 1.5 percent was inaccurate, and the meme was “unsubstantiated.”Unfortunately, the fact-check was short and poorly researched, and Facebook amplified the distilled inaccuracies across the meme seen above — exacerbating confusion and misunderstanding of worldwide public health directives, and encouraging disinformation about masks to proliferate.Incidentally, the May 4 2020 fact-check amplified by Facebook appeared to contradict guidance in India, where this particular site is based. An April 24 2020 ABC News item titled “The Latest: India announces easing of lockdown restrictions” reported:NEW DELHI — India announces easing of a stringent lockdown for 1.3 billion people by allowing opening of neighborhood and standalone shops with restrictions such as 50% of workers with face masks and social distancing.Initial Mask Guidance From Public Health Authorities in the United States Before Late March 2020To understand the ongoing confusion around the reliability and efficacy of masks as a tool for supporting public health during COVID-19, it is important to understand the timeline of public health guidance as the pandemic escalated.On March 31 2020, we fact-checked what was at that point novel guidance regarding the use of face masks in public in the United States:Should You Make a No-Sew Coronavirus Mask During the COVID-19 Pandemic?As we explained in that fact-check public health officials feared that a worldwide shortage in personal protective equipment was looming — a circumstance which quickly came to pass.Consequently, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams and the World Health Organization advised that PPE such as masks be reserved for medical workers on the front lines of caring for those who had contracted the virus as of late February 2020. However, as the situation worsened, the guidance shifted:Because of a worldwide shortage of supplies, there were still concurrent efforts to enlist people with sewing ability to make as many masks as possible for medical professionals. At the same time, the CDC relaxed its guidelines for personal protective equipment (PPE), and masks in particular.At a time of increased stock put in official recommendations, the CDC and Adams’ message stuck. A March 17 2020 New York Times editorial appeared just two weeks after the early March 2020 article warning Americans away from masks, speculating that the message taken away from earlier guidance on face masks did little to improve either managing supplies or the mitigating transmission. That, in turn, discouraged their use where available and reduced faith in their efficacy[. ]The Times editorial raised a number of counter-reasons masks should be worn in public during the COVID-19 pandemic, among them their known efficacy in reducing pathogen transmission; the existence of asymptomatic carriers; anecdotally lower rates in areas where masks were commonplace; and their ability to visually reinforce the risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2 in public places.As of March 31 2020, the WHO still hewed to recommendations that masks be reserved for medical professionals. To be clear, those guidelines were rooted in the primary goal of ensuring that medical personnel were not denied masks during a global shortage. A CNN report on WHO guidance made crystal clear the fact that masks absolutely work to reduce transmission. But the organization deeply feared a long-term protective gear shortage and its effects on healthcare around the world:World Health Organization officials [on March 30 2020] said they still recommend people not wear face masks unless they are sick with Covid-19 or caring for someone who is sick.That statement indicates that masks worn by both the infected and uninfected reduce rates of transmission; clearly, the WHO’s position was one of conservation, not any denial of the efficacy of masks. Per the World Health Organization, personal protective gear in short shrift — primarily masks — was to be reserved for the contagious and the uninfected.The CNN article continued:“There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on [March 30 2020].“There also is the issue that we have a massive global shortage,” Ryan said about masks and other medical supplies. “Right now the people most at risk from this virus are frontline health workers who are exposed to the virus every second of every day. The thought of them not having masks is horrific.”Again, the WHO did not deny that masks were effective in preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 between infected and uninfected people. Its position, and Adams’ position, was primarily that masks must be reserved for doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel spending much of their day in close contact caring for those already infected.Related concerns about improper mask usage were occasionally mentioned. However, at the same time mask recommendations for the general public began, public health officials also addressed how to wear and disinfect masks to avoid improper use that might increase the danger of infection:Did the President of Meharry Medical Advise Sterilizing Cloth Face Masks in the Microwave Between Uses?March 2020: The Public Health Tide Turns Toward Mask UseDates and the progression of information during an active and escalating pandemic are of vital importance in understanding why public health officials went from advising the public to avoid hoarding masks to informing the public wearing masks in public was safer from a public health perspective. On April 4 2020, MedPageToday.com’s “It’s Official: CDC Recommends Public Wear Face Masks” explained:The CDC is now recommending that everyone should wear a cloth face covering when out in public places to protect others in case they are unknowingly infected with the virus.Late [on the night of April 3 2020], the agency updated its consumer-facing web page for COVID-19 self-protection as follows:In those bullet points, several things are made clear in guidance as of April 3 2020, superseding guidance issued before that date:The article’s final paragraph once again hinted at an evolution of public health guidelines against a backdrop of an active pandemic and disinformation that clouded the issues around the transmission and the severity of the virus:While asymptomatic transmission of the virus outside of China was discovered in late January [2020], White House officials had initially suggested that it was not an important driver of transmission. “You really need to just focus on the individuals that are symptomatic,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar told ABC News in March [2020].That article referenced a CDC page last updated on April 3 2020, “Recommendation Regarding the Use of Cloth Face Coverings, Especially in Areas of Significant Community-Based Transmission.” Once again, the key points — reiterated everywhere — appeared:CDC continues to study the spread and effects of the novel coronavirus across the United States. We now know from recent studies that a significant portion of individuals with coronavirus lack symptoms (“asymptomatic”) and that even those who eventually develop symptoms (“pre-symptomatic”) can transmit the virus to others before showing symptoms. This means that the virus can spread between people interacting in close proximity—for example, speaking, coughing, or sneezing—even if those people are not exhibiting symptoms. In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.It is critical to emphasize that maintaining 6-feet social distancing remains important to slowing the spread of the virus. CDC is additionally advising the use of simple cloth face coverings to slow the spread of the virus and help people who may have the virus and do not know it from transmitting it to others. Cloth face coverings fashioned from household items or made at home from common materials at low cost can be used as an additional, voluntary public health measure.The cloth face coverings recommended are not surgical masks or N-95 respirators. Those are critical supplies that must continue to be reserved for healthcare workers and other medical first responders, as recommended by current CDC guidance.To reiterate what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said:The Mask Meme ItselfAlthough Newsmobile.in didn’t address the origin of the mask, we were able to managed to track down the creator of the graphic.We learned that the graphic came years before SARS-CoV-2, and was created in 2010 by Larry Bowen of In-Tox Products. Bowen clearly did not create the image as advice about a virus not yet in existence in 2010. Here’s what Bowen had to say when our debunker Arturo Garcia contacted him via email to ask about the graphic and COVID-19:Maybe I can offer this succinct synopsis regarding face masks and COVID-19:I have worked in high-containment bio labs for many years and worn several types of respiratory protection including face masks and respirators. Knowing what I have learned or have been told about the COVID-19 and all that is still unknown, I would not walk into a room that had any amount (concentration) of airborne COVID-19 while wearing any of the face masks (including the N95 respirator) I tested in my paper without understanding there is some level of risk and danger to my health. Any other interpretation would give a sense of false security – in my humble opinion.Bowen highlighted an unavoidable element of the COVID-19 pandemic — as a novel coronavirus, very little was known about the rate of spread and efficacy of masks. Papers to cite did not yet exist, and firm numbers remained elusive.What we had in their absence were best guesses based on existing information, such as Bowen’s 2010 image explaining how masks worked to protect and reduce transmission of airborne pathogens.In ConclusionFacebook’s fact-checking program dangerously and incautiously labeled a meme indicating masks primarily worked to contain spread of SARS-CoV-2 during the pandemic; when we saw it shared, the poster commented “Even the “fact checkers” don’t buy into this 🤷♂️.”Unfortunately, Facebook’s flags have far larger reach than the initial meme — a meme now suppressed by the algorithm, ironically, as spreading “false” information.A 211-word-long “fact check” was cited as the reasoning behind flagging the meme. That fact-check leaned on WHO guidance about reserving PPE, such as masks, for healthcare workers; it was not only based on outdated information, but posed a threat to public health by heavily implying that masks did not work in the way the meme suggested. In fact, the CDC explicitly stated it was “advising the use of simple cloth face coverings to slow the spread of the virus and help people who may have the virus and do not know it from transmitting it to others.”Comments
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“50 percent” of “Iowans under 65 in David Young’s district have preexisting conditions.
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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is airing ads across the country to boost Democrats’ chances of taking control of the House. But we found several ads that ran afoul of the facts.
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mixture
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American Health Care Act, emails, preexisting conditions, Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,
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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is airing ads across the country to boost Democrats’ chances of taking control of the House. But we found several ads that ran afoul of the facts.The DCCC, an official party committee, is the second biggest spender behind the Congressional Leadership Fund, which calls itself “the super PAC endorsed by House Republican leadership.” As of Oct. 19, CLF has spent more than $93 million, while the DCCC has spent nearly $66 million, on so-called “independent expenditures,” according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Independent expenditures are TV ads and other forms of political communications that advocate for the election or defeat of a candidate. Earlier this week, we looked at some of the TV ads being run by CFL. Here we look at a sampling of DCCC ads that have aired this month. The DCCC uses a misleading talking point in an ad in Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, saying that “50 percent” of “Iowans under 65 in David Young’s district have preexisting conditions. But Young voted to deny protections for their health care coverage.”Young’s vote was in 2017 for the Republicans’ American Health Care Act, which would have lessened the protections under the Affordable Care Act for those with preexisting conditions — but it wouldn’t have eliminated all of them. And, more important, the changes would have applied to the individual market, where 7 percent of the U.S. population (and 6 percent of Iowans statewide) buys insurance.The 50 percent figure comes from the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress, which applied Census Bureau population data to an Obama-era Department of Health and Human Services report. That report estimated how many Americans could be denied coverage, charged more or faced coverage exclusions if they were seeking coverage on the individual market before the ACA’s protections went into effect in 2014, because of their preexisting conditions. Those conditions ranged from high cholesterol and arthritis to cancer and heart disease.As the CAP analysis notes, those not seeking insurance on the individual market — including those with employer-sponsored insurance, which is where about half of Americans get their coverage — wouldn’t lose their insurance because of any preexisting conditions.CAP, April 5, 2017: While people with Medicaid or employer-based plans would remain covered regardless of medical history, the repeal of pre-ex protections means that the millions with pre-existing conditions would face higher rates if they ever needed individual market coverage.The American Health Care Act, as we’ve explained before, would have prohibited insurance companies from denying coverage based on health status, like the ACA. However, unlike the ACA, it would have allowed insurance companies on the individual market to price premiums based on health status in some cases. Under the plan, which passed the House but not the Senate, a state could apply for a waiver to allow medical-based pricing for people who do not maintain continuous coverage, defined as a lapse of 63 days or more over the previous 12 months.Those policyholders could be charged higher premiums on the individual market for their preexisting conditions for one year. After that, as long as there wasn’t another 63-day gap, the policyholder would get a new premium not based on health status.States with those waivers would have to set up high-risk pools or risk-sharing programs, designed to assist those with high medical costs.The GOP plan also wouldn’t have allowed insurers to exclude coverage of someone’s particular medical conditions. However, states also could get a waiver to set their own requirements on what essential benefits insurers had to include in their plans. Under the ACA, insurers must cover a list of 10 benefits.So, Young did vote for a plan that would have lessened preexisting condition protections for those on the individual market — but the estimated 50 percent of people in his district with some kind of medical condition would have to be seeking insurance on that market before they potentially could have been charged higher premiums under that plan.Two other DCCC ads say the Republican candidates cast votes against those with preexisting conditions, even though the lawmakers ultimately voted against the AHCA — and in doing so, cited their concerns that the Republican-sponsored bill didn’t do enough on patient protections.In Colorado’s 6th District, the DCCC has aired an ad that says Rep. Mike Coffman “voted to end protections for preexisting conditions,” and on-screen it says “13 times.” A DCCC press release links to four of those votes — to repeal the ACA, or state that it should be repealed — that were cast in 2011, 2012 and 2015. As we said, the ACA includes several provisions to protect those with preexisting conditions, and with these votes, Republicans didn’t offer a substitute for the health care law.So, it’s true that the votes would have ended those protections. Then again, lawmakers knew the repeal measures were symbolic votes, taken while Barack Obama was still president and had veto power.But Coffman’s repeal votes don’t tell the whole story. When it came time for the House to actually pass a repeal-and-replace bill, Coffman voted against the American Health Care Act. In all, 20 Republicans voted “no.”He also cited his concerns about provisions regarding preexisting conditions in doing so. In a press release on the day of the vote, Coffman cited Rep. Tom MacArthur’s amendment — which added the provision about state waivers to charge some policyholders more on the individual market.“At this time, I cannot support the AHCA with the MacArthur amendment because I’m concerned that a small percentage of those with preexisting conditions may still not be protected,” Coffman said. “This does not take away from the fact that the Affordable Care Act is failing and American families are hurting. In my conversations with House leadership and the Administration over the last 72 hours, I made it clear that additional language was necessary to protect this vulnerable group.”Similarly, a DCCC ad against Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania’s 1st District cites three procedural votes in claiming the Republican lawmaker “voted against protecting people with preexisting conditions.” (Coffman sided with Republicans, too, on those votes. )But Fitzpatrick, like Coffman, voted against the GOP health care bill.The Washington Post Fact Checker reviewed the three votes in question in depth, finding they were “minor procedural votes,” not votes to actually pass legislation. “All of these votes have to do with parliamentary actions — a vote on the previous question (in plain language, ending debate) and a motion to send a bill back to committee,” the Fact Checker wrote.Two of the votes — on May 3 and 4, 2017 — were Democratic efforts to change House rules to block health care legislation that would end preexisting condition protections. And the other vote would have sent a bill back to committee with instructions to add language regarding such protections.But the Republican votes wouldn’t have ended the ACA’s protections.In ultimately voting against the GOP health care plan — a measure that would have ended some of those protections — Fitzpatrick said in a statement that “any changes to our current system must ensure both the continuity of coverage and the continuity of patient protection provisions.”In Pennsylvania’s 16th Congressional District, the DCCC attacks Rep. Mike Kelly for his vote on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed into law in December.The ad says, “2010. Car Dealer Mike Kelly is elected to Congress. And while there, his net worth increased by millions. So, it’s no surprise he helped give special tax breaks to car dealers — like himself.”The first claim — about Kelly’s net worth increasing while in Congress — is unsubstantiated. The second — about “tax breaks” — lacks context.The DCCC’s research report on Kelly says, “When Kelly ran for office, his net worth was an estimated $8.05 million. In 2015, after four years in Congress, Kelly’s net worth grew to an estimated $18.61 million – a $10.56 million increase.” That’s false.The DCCC cites the Center for Responsive Politics as its source. But that group’s website – opensecrets.org – says Kelly’s average net worth was $34.6 million in 2010 when he ran for office, and it dropped to $19.3 million in 2011, his first year in Congress. Kelly took office on Jan. 3, 2011.As of 2015, the most recent year available, Kelly had an average net worth of $18.6 million. So his net worth is still below the level it was at when he ran for office in 2010, despite the ad’s claim.Amanda Sherman, a DCCC spokeswoman, made the point that Kelly filed a financial disclosure report in 2010, while a candidate for office, that showed he was worth $8.05 million in 2009. But when the reports were filed is irrelevant. The fact is Kelly’s average net worth increased before he took office, not while in office, as the ad erroneously claims.As for the ad’s reference to “tax breaks” for car dealers, the DCCC is referring to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a $1.5 trillion law that overhauled the nation’s tax code. It cut corporate tax rates, changed the individual income tax brackets and reduced estate taxes, among other things.While the narrator says that Kelly “helped give special tax breaks to car dealers like himself,” the ad displays a Wall Street Journal headline that says, “Car Dealers Win Carveout in Latest GOP Tax Proposal.” The Journal story was about a provision added on Nov. 9, 2017, that addressed the treatment of interest on “floor plan financing indebtedness,” which the global consulting firm KPMG explains is interest paid on loans that are “used to finance the acquisition of motor vehicles held for sale or lease.” That includes cars, boats, farm machinery or other vehicles purchased by dealers for lease or sale.Car dealerships, for example, borrow money in order to maintain a stock of new and used cars on their lots. Under the old tax law, the interest on those loans was fully deductible. The House bill maintained 100 percent deductibility of interest. Rep. Kevin Brady, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, added the provision, according to the Wall Street Journal article cited by the DCCC. The story mentions that Kelly is one of three House members who “have been in the auto-dealing business.” He owns Mike Kelly Automotive Group in Butler, Pennsylvania.Kelly is a member of the committee and voted for Brady’s amendment, but the DCCC offered no evidence that Kelly was involved in the drafting of the provision that affects his business.Despite the House vote in November, the Senate version of the tax bill “would have reduced the current 100 percent deduction of floor plan interest to 30 percent of adjusted taxable income,” according to the National Automobile Dealers Association. However, Sen. Rand Paul sponsored an amendment to preserve full deductibility of floor plan interest, which was included in the bill approved by the Senate on Dec. 2, 2017, according to the NADA.Kelly voted for the final bill, which passed the House largely along party lines, 227 to 203, on Dec. 19, 2017. Trump signed it on Dec. 22, 2017.John S. Treu, an assistant professor of accounting at West Virginia University, said it “would be appropriate” to characterize the treatment of floor plan financing as a “carveout.”“The TCJA introduced a general limitation on interest deductibility based on adjusted taxable income and so maintaining the status quo for certain types of debt would also be a special carve out,” Treu told us in an email. “So I guess it would be appropriate to characterize it as a carve-out that maintained the status quo because the deduction for other types of interest income was being limited.”We can’t say what role, if any, Kelly had in the House provision, but we know that the carveout would not have become law without the help of Paul in the Senate. We also can say for sure that the passage of a bill in December 2017 had no impact on Kelly’s net worth while in Congress from 2011 to 2015, contrary to the DCCC’s implication.Kelly faces Democrat Ron DiNicola in the Nov. 6 election. According to the Erie Times-News, this is the DCCC’s first ad in the race since DiNicola was added to the committee’s Red to Blue campaign to flip control of the House from Republican to Democratic.A DCCC ad in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District misleadingly says Rep. Barbara Comstock voted for “the Trump tax plan that gives almost all the benefits to the richest 1 percent, while middle-class families pay higher taxes.” Actually, most middle-income families will see a tax cut in the first years of the plan. When and if many of the individual income tax changes expire after 2025, those middle-income tax cuts disappear.The ad portrays Comstock as a rubber stamp for Trump’s agenda, saying she has voted with Trump “97.8 percent of the time.” That’s true, according to a FiveThirtyEight.com analysis last updated on Oct. 10. It’s also true, as the ad says, that that is the highest among Virginia’s congressional delegation (though tied with Republican Rep. Scott Taylor).But the ad cherry-picks to make the point that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — which Comstock supported — “gives almost all the benefits to the richest 1 percent, while middle-class families pay higher taxes.”According to an analysis of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, taxes will decline on average across all income groups in 2018. While “middle-class families” is a subjective classification, TPC noted that in 2018 “taxpayers in the middle income quintile (those with income between about $49,000 and $86,000) would receive an average tax cut of about $900, or 1.6 percent of after-tax income.” Upper-income taxpayers, especially those in the top 1 percent, would benefit even more as a share of after-tax income.Those middle-income taxpayers would continue to see tax cuts through 2025, TPC said, on average about $900 that year, or 1.3 percent of after-tax income. However, because most of the individual income tax provisions are scheduled to sunset after 2025, TPC found that by 2027, “taxpayers in the middle income quintile would see no material change on average.” Those in the bottom two quintiles, after seeing a small tax cut through 2025 “would face an average tax increase of 0.1 percent of after-tax income.” Some of those could be considered “middle class.”Republicans added sunset provisions to most of the individual tax cut provisions so that the bill could pass through budget reconciliation, a process requiring only a majority vote in the Senate. In order to do that, Republican lawmakers could not add more than $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. Nor could they have a bill that added to the deficit beyond that 10-year window. However, Republicans say they expect a future Congress will extend those cuts.An image in the ad says “83 percent of benefits to the richest 1 percent.” This is a frequent Democratic criticism of the tax plan, but, as we have written, it cherry-picks to a time after most of the individual income tax changes have expired (and assumes they are not extended). So it’s true that an estimated 83 percent of the tax benefits are projected to go to the top 1 percent in 2027, but in 2025 — the last year before those tax changes expire — a quarter of the tax cuts go to the top 1 percent.The ad cites a Washington Post blog that says “some” middle-class taxpayers would see a tax increase and that the lion’s share of the tax benefits would accrue to upper-income Americans. Still, until the individual tax changes expire, most in the middle-income range will get a tax cut.A DCCC ad in Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District talks about an “email scandal” involving Republican candidate Pete Stauber, a St. Louis County commissioner, saying he “was caught using county tax dollars to help his congressional campaign.” The ad says voters ought to send a message that “we’ve got enough corrupt politicians in Washington.” But there’s less to this “scandal” than the ad suggests.Stauber is accused of swapping 15 emails with people from the National Republican Congressional Committee. That appears to run afoul of St. Louis County policy, which states, “St. Louis County elected officials will not use St. Louis County funds, equipment, supplies, employees, or facilities in support of their own campaigns for reelection, other candidates for public office, or political organizations.”So that’s the backdrop for the DCCC ad, which states, “Emails scandals. This time it’s Pete Stauber in the hot seat. He was caught using county tax dollars to help his congressional campaign. Now he’s refusing to answer questions and won’t release his emails. Send Pete Stauber a message, we’ve got enough corrupt politicians in Washington.” In response to inquiries from the Star Tribune, St. Louis County confirmed there were 15 emails between Stauber’s county email address and the NRCC, which is backing Stauber as one of its “Young Guns” in a seat critical to Republicans holding onto control of the House. Stauber faces Democrat Joe Radinovich and independence party candidate Ray Sandman in the general election.It’s true, as the ad says, that Stauber has refused to release those emails, and the county won’t either. The county administrator and assistant county attorney both say the emails are, according to state statute, private data and cannot be released without the consent of one of the emailing parties. (The Minnesota Department of Administration disagrees, and asked the county to make the emails reviewable. We take no position on that. )But the county says it looked at the emails and determined no further action was required.“We proactively reviewed the emails through the lens of our Code of Conduct for Elected Officials Policy and were satisfied that no investigation or further review was warranted,” said St. Louis County spokeswoman Dana Kazel, according to the Duluth News Tribune. The county commission is a nonpartisan board, meaning commissioners don’t run on any party ticket.The ad cites a WDIO-TV news report on the story, which does state that Stauber is “in the hot seat” over the emails. In that report, Cynthia Rugeley, associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, says, “It’s a legitimate question on why you did it, and why you did it 15 times.” But, she said, “It’s not a serious violation by any stretch. … I would think 9 times out of 10 a county would make the same decision [not to take any further action].”We reached out to Rugeley as well and she again noted, “There were 15 emails. He did use county email for the communication.” As for the ad’s claim that Stauber “was caught using county tax dollars to help his congressional campaign,” that’s a stretch.“I guess you could make the argument about time he spent on a government computer,” Rugeley said. “I don’t know where he read it and elected officials do not have 8-5 business hours, making that a dubious claim. So, I don’t think the money argument works.”We don’t either. It appears Stauber may have violated county policy with emails to the NRCC, but saying he “was caught using county tax dollars to help his congressional campaign” and implying that the email flap makes Stauber another “corrupt politician” goes too far.Update, Oct. 22: The ad also makes a reference, via one of the articles cited in the ad, to an ethics complaint filed against Stauber regarding an opioid crisis roundtable he hosted in August attended by U.S. Rep. Greg Walden and other county commissioners. The complaint alleges the event was a misuse of his position as a county commissioner to promote his campaign. The event was publicized by the county, and the county’s communications manager tweeted about it. Stauber later released a statement saying the event was organized by his campaign, and “I should have made a clear distinction for the county when it promoted the worthwhile event. I regret the confusion.” Although the ad focuses on an “email scandal,” the Radinovich campaign told us after we posted our article that the opioid roundtable was “an illegal misuse of official staff time.”
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Robots fight weeds in challenge to agrochemical giants.
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In a field of sugar beet in Switzerland, a solar-powered robot that looks like a table on wheels scans the rows of crops with its camera, identifies weeds and zaps them with jets of blue liquid from its mechanical tentacles.
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true
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Environment
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Undergoing final tests before the liquid is replaced with weedkiller, the Swiss robot is one of new breed of AI weeders that investors say could disrupt the $100 billion pesticides and seeds industry by reducing the need for universal herbicides and the genetically modified (GM) crops that tolerate them. Dominated by companies such as Bayer, DowDuPont, BASF and Syngenta, the industry is bracing for the impact of digital agricultural technology and some firms are already adapting their business models. The stakes are high. Herbicide sales are worth $26 billion a year and account for 46 percent of pesticides revenue overall while 90 percent of GM seeds have some herbicide tolerance built in, according to market researcher Phillips McDougall. “Some of the profit pools that are now in the hands of the big agrochemical companies will shift, partly to the farmer and partly to the equipment manufacturers,” said Cedric Lecamp, who runs the $1 billion Pictet-Nutrition fund that invests in companies along the food supply chain. In response, producers such as Germany’s Bayer have sought partners for their own precision spraying systems while ChemChina’s Syngenta [CNNCC.UL], for example, is looking to develop crop protection products suited to the new equipment. While still in its infancy, the plant-by-plant approach heralds a marked shift from standard methods of crop production. Now, non-selective weedkillers such as Monsanto’s Roundup are sprayed on vast tracts of land planted with tolerant GM seeds, driving one of the most lucrative business models in the industry. But ecoRobotix www.ecorobotix.com/en, developer of the Swiss weeder, believes its design could reduce the amount of herbicide farmers use by 20 times. The company said it is close to signing a financing round with investors and is due to go on the market by early 2019. Blue River, a Silicon Valley startup bought by U.S. tractor company Deere & Co. for $305 million last year, has also developed a machine using on-board cameras to distinguish weeds from crops and only squirt herbicides where necessary. Its “See and Spray” weed control machine, which has been tested in U.S. cotton fields, is towed by a tractor and the developers estimate it could cut herbicide use by 90 percent once crops have started growing. German engineering company Robert Bosch here is also working on similar precision spraying kits as are other startups such as Denmark's Agrointelli here ROBO Global www.roboglobal.com/about-us, an advisory firm that runs a robotics and automation investment index tracked by funds worth a combined $4 billion, believes plant-by-plant precision spraying will only gain in importance. “A lot of the technology is already available. It’s just a question of packaging it together at the right cost for the farmers,” said Richard Lightbound, Robo’s CEO for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “If you can reduce herbicides by the factor of 10 it becomes very compelling for the farmer in terms of productivity. It’s also eco friendly and that’s clearly going to be very popular, if not compulsory, at some stage,” he said. While Blue River, based in Sunnyvale, California, is testing a product in cotton fields, it plans to branch into other major crops such as soy. It expects to make the product widely available to farmers in about four to five years, helped by Deere’s vast network of equipment dealers. ROBO’s Lightbound and Pictet’s Lecamp said they were excited by the project and Jeneiv Shah, deputy manager of the 152 million pound ($212 million) Sarasin Food & Agriculture Opportunities fund, said the technology would put Bayer and Syngenta’s crop businesses at risk while seed firms could be hit - albeit to a lesser extent. “The fact that a tractor and row-crop oriented company such as John Deere did this means it won’t be long before corn or soybean farmers in the U.S. Midwest will start using precision spraying,” Shah said. While the technology promises to save money, it could be a tough sell to some U.S. farmers as five years of bumper harvests have depressed prices for staples including corn and soybeans. U.S. farm incomes have dropped by more than half since 2013, reducing spending on equipment, seeds and fertilizer. Still, the developments are giving investors in agrochemicals stocks pause for thought, according to Berenberg analyst Nick Anderson. And agrochemical giants are taking note. Bayer, which will become the world’s biggest seeds and pesticides producer when its acquisition of GM crop pioneer Monsanto completes, teamed up with Bosch in September for a “smart spraying” research project. The German partners plan to outpace rivals by using an on-board arsenal of up to six different herbicides and Bayer hopes the venture will prepare it for a new commercial model - rather than cannibalizing its current business. “I would assume that within three years we would have a robust commercially feasible model,” Liam Condon, the head of Bayer’s crop science division said in February. “I’m not concerned in terms of damping sales because we don’t define ourselves as a volume seller. We rather offer a prescription for a weed-free field, and we get paid based on the quality of the outcome,” he said. Bayer agreed to sell its digital farming ventures, including the Bosch project, to German rival BASF as part of efforts to win antitrust approval to buy Monsanto. But BASF will grant Bayer an unspecified license to the digital assets and products. BASF said the Bosch precision spraying collaboration was very interesting but it was too early to comment further as the transaction had not completed. Syngenta, which was an investor in Blue River before Deere took over, said the advantages of the new technology outweighed any potential threats to its business model. “We will be part of the story, by making formulations and new molecules that are developed specifically for this technology,” said Renaud Deval, global head of weed control at Syngenta, which was bought by ChemChina last year. While it has no plans to invest directly in engineering, Syngenta is looking into partnerships where it can contribute products and services, Deval said. Still, Sarasin’s Shah said the big agrochemical firms would need to accelerate spending on getting their businesses ready for new digital agricultural technology. “The established players need to invest a lot more than they currently are to be positioned better in 10 years’ time. The sense of urgency will increase as farmers start to adopt some of the more advanced kits that are coming out,” he said. Michael Underhill, chief investment officer at Capital Innovations, also said the major players may be underestimating the potential impact on their pesticides businesses. “Precision leads to efficiency, efficiency leads to decreased usage, decreased usage leads to decreased margins or margin compression, and that will lead to companies getting leaner and meaner,” said Underhill. He said the GM seeds market would also take a hit if machine learning takes over the role genetic engineering has played so far in shielding crops from herbicides’ friendly fire. “Instead of buying the Cadillac of seeds or the Tesla of seeds, they may be buying the Chevy version,” Underhill said. The advent of precision weed killing also comes at a time blanket spraying of global blockbusters such as glyphosate is under fire from environmentalists and regulators alike. More than 20 years of near-ubiquitous use of glyphosate, the active substance in Monsanto’s Roundup, has created resistant strains of weeds that are spreading across the U.S. farm belt. Regulators have raised the bar for bringing blanket chemical agents to market and the fear of toxic risks has been heightened by the debate over the potential impact of glyphosate on health. Michael Owen, associate chair at Iowa State University’s Department of Agronomy, reckons it would now cost agrochemical giants up to an almost prohibitive $400 million to develop a next-generation universal weedkiller. Bayer’s Condon said in the current environment precision spraying could well be the final blow to further attempts to develop new broad-spectrum or non-selective herbicides. “Everything that comes tends to be selective in nature. There won’t be a new glyphosate. That was probably a once-in-a-lifetime product,” said Condon. For now, the industry is reviving and reformulating older, broad-spectrum agents known as dicamba and 2,4-D to finish off glyphosate-resistant weeds - and it is selling new GM crops tolerant to those herbicides too. Precision spraying could mean established herbicides whose effect has worn off on some weeds could be used successfully in more potent, targeted doses, said Claude Juriens, head of business development at ecoRobotics in Yverdon-les Bains. But experts say new products will still be needed for the new technology and some chemical firms are considering reviving experimental herbicides once deemed too costly or complex. “Because we’re now giving the grower an order of magnitude reduction in the amount of herbicide they’re using, all of a sudden these more expensive, exotic herbicides are now in play again,” said Willy Pell, Blue River director of new technology. “They’ve actually devoted resources to looking through their backlog, kind of cutting room floor, and rethinking these different materials with our machine in mind,” he said.
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4006
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3 more measles cases confirmed in Georgia county.
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Georgia health officials have confirmed three additional cases of measles in an Atlanta area county where a middle school student was recently diagnosed with the virus.
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true
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Health, Atlanta, Georgia, Measles
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The Georgia Department of Public Health said Friday at least two of the three new measles patients in Cobb County are not vaccinated. All three are part of the same family. Tests are under way to determine if yet one more person is infected. Cobb County school district officials said Monday that a student at Mabry Middle School in Marietta had measles. State health officials said it’s highly likely all the Cobb County cases are related, but they are still investigating. Measles is highly contagious. The U.S. has experienced a resurgence of the illness that’s fueled by outbreaks in unvaccinated communities.
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6362
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Store clerk in Las Vegas tests positive for hepatitis A.
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Health officials say a clerk at a Las Vegas convenience store has tested positive for hepatitis A.
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true
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Health, General News, Hepatitis, Las Vegas, Nevada
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The Southern Nevada Health District is warning that store customers could be at risk of infection. Transmission of hepatitis A from food handlers to patrons is rare. But the health district cautions that customers of a 7-Eleven convenience store on South Maryland Parkway who purchased non-prepackaged foods such as hot dogs or hot deli items from July 26 to Aug. 6 may have been exposed to the virus. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that the case is linked to the ongoing hepatitis A outbreak in Clark County. There have been 86 reported cases so far and one person has died. ___ Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal, http://www.lvrj.com
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45
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Johnson & Johnson says new tests show no asbestos in Johnson's Baby Powder.
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Johnson & Johnson said on Tuesday that recent tests showed that Johnson’s Baby Powder was free of asbestos, after U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigations reported trace amounts of the material in the product earlier this year.
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true
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Health News
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A total of 155 tests were conducted by two different third-party labs using four different testing methods on samples from the same bottle tested by the FDA’s contracted lab, the company said. The tests are the latest effort by J&J to prove the safety of its widely used consumer product after the test by the FDA prompted J&J to undertake a nationwide recall of one lot of Johnson’s Baby Powder in October. The FDA was not immediately available for comment. However, in response to an October announcement from J&J that a smaller number of independent tests also found no asbestos, the regulatory agency said it stood by its findings. The different test outcomes could have resulted from the fact that contaminants are not uniformly dispersed throughout talc and there is no standard test for asbestos in talc, FDA officials told Reuters in October. Tests conducted by the third-party labs showed asbestos was not present in the single bottle that the FDA’s contracted lab had tested, nor was it present in retained samples of the finished lot from which the bottle was produced, the company said on Tuesday. The company said its investigation concluded that the most probable root causes for the FDA’s reported results were either test sample contamination or analyst error at the lab, or both. In October, J&J recalled around 33,000 bottles of baby powder in the United States after the FDA said it had found trace amounts of asbestos in samples taken from a bottle purchased online. The voluntary recall was limited to one lot of Johnson’s Baby Powder produced and shipped in the United States in 2018, the company said at the time. That move marked the first time the company recalled its baby powder for possible asbestos contamination, and the first time U.S. regulators have announced a finding of asbestos in the product. Asbestos is a known carcinogen that has been linked to deadly mesothelioma. The recall was the latest blow to the more than 130-year-old U.S. healthcare conglomerate that is facing thousands of lawsuits over a variety of products, including baby powder, opioids, medical devices and the antipsychotic Risperdal. J&J faces more than 15,000 lawsuits from consumers claiming its talc products, including Johnson’s Baby Powder, caused their cancer.
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9573
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Weight-Loss Surgery Sheds Pounds Long Term
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Bariatric surgeries have been identified as perhaps the most successful means for people who are morbidly obese to lose weight, and use of these procedures is increasing, according to the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery. Information about whether the weight-loss results last, and for how long, is a useful addition to the growing medical literature on these surgeries. The study described here by HealthDay speaks directly to the issue in a couple of well-designed analyses, and the story does a good job of explaining both the methods and the results. Missing from an otherwise good narrative is information about the risks of these procedures, as well as their costs and overall availability to the general public. Obesity is a major health issue in the United States, and the use of bariatric surgical procedures is being used increasingly for those who are morbidly obese. Knowing how long people keep the weight off–and by how much—is useful for those deciding whether to opt into the procedure. Also of interest is if the health benefits, such as remission of type 2 diabetes, were sustained, though this study didn’t appear to investigate that.
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true
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bariatric surgery
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Cost is not a component of this story. That is an issue, as the story compares three weight-loss surgical options for morbidly obese individuals, and readers might well be interested in the economics. Also, it would be useful to discuss the costs of not having surgery in the matched population. The story does a nice job of making the weight loss comparisons—both over time for gastric bypass surgery and across surgical options—clear. The story makes no mention of harms. Bariatric procedures can lead to an array of complications that are worth considering. And on the flip side, it’s worth noting that research also has indicated that bariatric surgery can both extend quantity and quality of life when compared to not having surgery. Details of the two-part study conducted here are included and clearly described. And we were also pleased to see several study limitations discussed: “For example, the study included mostly men, so the findings may not apply to women.” That said, we do wish more had been said about the study participants, such as average body mass index levels before and after the surgeries. Morbid obesity is a major and growing health issue with frustratingly few treatment options. Sources are clearly identified, along with information about their links to the study itself (one scientist was the study’s lead researcher, and the other quoted in the story was independent). This is another strong point of the story. The study compared the longer term weight-loss outcomes of the three primary bariatric surgical procedures. The story doesn’t make it readily clear how accessible these surgeries are, and who is a good candidate for one. Typically, these procedures are for people over a certain body-mass index, for example. And insurance coverage may or may not pay for it. The story is clear that this study contributes to a growing set of data about long-term weight-loss effects of these surgeries. Duke Medicine issued a news release, and the HealthDay story does not rely solely on it.
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32321
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"A video depicts a Chinese vendor making ""synthetic cabbages"" for sale in American restaurants and supermarkets."
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Even in the absence of ample evidence that wax food displays are exceptionally common in Asia, it stands to reason that synthetic cabbages wouldn’t fly as a market staple anywhere in the world due to the fact that wax is unpalatable and would clearly melt when cooked, and cabbage’s relatively low price point makes such a substitution costlier than retailing genuine cabbage.
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false
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Fauxtography, fake, food from china, made in china
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On 17 February 2016, the Facebook page “The People’s Voice” published a video purportedly depicting “[a]rtificial synthetic ‘cabbages’ … being made in China in just 40 seconds flat … coming to a grocery store near you soon”: The foreign language clip, titled “Fake Cabbage in Market,” involved a man ladling colored liquids into a large bowl of water, then artfully shaping the substance into a cabbage-like object. The man sliced the items crosswise to reveal what looked similar to a halved head of cabbage. But the purported footage of the “synthetic cabbage” maker displayed Korean characters and a logo for the SBS (Seoul Broadcasting System), indicating that the clip did not depict covert counterfeit cabbage making its way from China to the U.S. Another video more accurately described the process as one for making artificial lettuce used for display purposes only in Japanese restaurants: Additional videos documented the process of crafting hyperrealistic fake foods for display in Asia: A 2014 Kotaku article provided additional context for “fake food” videos frequently misrepresented on social media: At many Japanese restaurants, there is plastic food out front. The fake meals function as supplements to the menu so people can see what the meals actually look like. And the way this phoney food is made is fascinating. As previously posted, plastic food is called “shokuhin sample” (食品サンプル) or “food sample” in Japanese. Many restaurants work closely with the phoney food craftsmen, with the actual meals being molded to ensure the sample accurately represents the real deal. The video as presented to English-speaking audiences leaned heavily on the trope holding that sneaky and dangerous fake or adulterated food from China is rife in American markets. Some similar claims about the country’s edible exports have held that soy sauce is made from human hair, crabs are injected with saline to create a deceptively appetizing appearance, imported Chinese garlic is sprayed with dangerous pesticides, China is processing and reshipping U.S.-raised chickens, and Chinese corned beef is made from corpses. The Kitchn, First We Feast, and BuzzFeed have also covered the trend as an example of replica artistry, not as proof of China’s flooding American supermarkets with synthetic farmed goods.
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6776
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Utah soccer star overcomes challenges as openly gay athlete.
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Carly Nelson loves everything about her goalkeeper’s job description for the Utah women’s soccer team, including the pressure of keeping opponents from scoring, having a unique view of the field and directing the defenders in front of her. “And, of course,” she said, “wearing the different colors.”
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true
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Health, Utah, Womens soccer, Soccer, General News
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Nelson has worn distinctive goalie uniforms of gray, pink, blue and yellow at various times in her Ute career. Those color choices are her personal expressions, just as her parents once believed about her sexual orientation. Being openly gay as a college athlete is part of Nelson’s complex story that includes a suicide attempt as a teenager in Utah County, an evolving relationship with her family and recent health issues, all while thriving as a face of Ute soccer. The senior leads the Pac-12 with 71 saves in 14 games; the Utes are 6-5-3 overall and 1-2-2 in the Pac-12, tied for seventh place. Nelson needed surgery in June to remove a piece of her jawbone after being diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a rare bone infection. The follow-up treatment required intravenous antibiotics for six weeks, and Nelson even played in a couple of games this past summer for the Utah Royals FC reserve team with a medication tube in her arm. “As far as we know, it’s all better,” she said, although some pain has resurfaced lately. When it was suggested that she has experienced a lot in her 21 years, she laughs good-naturedly. “It could seem like I’ve had a rough time, but . I’ve loved my journey, where I’ve been and what it’s put me through, because it’s made me who I am today,” she said, sitting on the sideline of Utah’s new soccer field. “I genuinely love the person that I am.” Who she is involves many labels, including her self-description of “very loving, understanding, fun, positive, happy; I love life. I’m very passionate about what I do. . People call me intense, but I don’t think I’m that intense.” Emily Ruff, her oldest sister: “Just a rad chick. . sweet and sensitive, tough and resilient.” Eric Nelson, her father, says she’s courageous, humble and kind, caring about teammates throughout the roster. Ute teammate Tavia Leachman: “Hilarious . kind of just a light to be around, just a joy. Always positive, always caring about other people before herself, very goal-oriented. . hyper-focused on the well-being of other people. That’s not something you find in a lot of people.” And she’s lived through a lot, as partly detailed in recent stories on the Utah Athletics website and in the Daily Utah Chronicle student newspaper. The Salt Lake Tribune’s subsequent interviews have covered more of her family dynamics, how her parents went from thinking she could change her sexual orientation after she initially came out to them as a college freshman to radically altering their perspective of the subject. “I’ve apologized to Carly since then, because I did my homework,” said her father, Eric, who raised four daughters with his wife, Joy, in Lindon. “I came to understand that no amount of personal choice and freedom could change orientation. God’s design includes LGBT.” What he describes as “a clear and powerful change in my paradigm” came from reading Christian woman Vicky Beeching’s book, “Undivided: Coming Out, Becoming Whole and Living Free From Shame.” Conversations with a BYU staff member, who’s openly gay and remains a fellow member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, further shaped his outlook. Carly Nelson was hospitalized in ninth grade after attempting suicide. At the time, her family was unaware of her orientation and the accompanying social pressure. “I was super oblivious to everything she was going through, growing up,” said Emily, who’s eight years older. She shares that episode in an effort to “help people realize that, yes, that’s a real issue ... because we don’t feel like we have that support, we don’t feel like we can talk about it,” she said. “We’re isolated, so the only way we feel like we get rid of our pain is to move on with our lives. . It was a very scary thing to admit, but I think a lot of people do struggle with it and it’s more of a big issue than we realize.” When she did come out to her parents, the news shook them and “created a barrier in our relationship,” Carly Nelson said. “It was really bad for two years. . Going through that really rough period of time when we weren’t speaking, just not being in each other’s lives, and to now, I think that was the barrier our relationship needed for it to come back stronger.” Eric Nelson clarifies that he and his wife never “cut her off in any way.” The parents sent encouraging text messages, invited her to family events and covered half of her expenses beyond her athletic scholarship, while hoping to develop self-reliance, he said. “I told her she was loved and would always be welcome in my home,” he said. “And I meant it then as I do now.” Yet he understands why Carly felt isolated, after he told her she could overcome her orientation by “hard work.” “Carly and I have been close throughout her life,” he said, “so for her dad to not understand the most important part of her identity would be crushing.” Her sisters were accepting, with Emily once pushing back after being urged to help Carly change. “Mom,” Emily responded, “she is normal.” Nelson’s parents now view themselves as LGBTQ advocates, hoping to help other parents understand their children’s orientations. Eric Nelson describes his research into the subject as “a great blessing to me, to learn how uninformed I was.” The family has “settled into a nice normalcy,” according to Emily, and Nelson’s teammates admire them. “It’s crazy to think how far she’s come and how hard that was for her and how it was such a battle internally and externally with the environment we’re in,” said Leachman, her teammate for four seasons. “She’s thriving; she has amazing support, amazing family, amazing friends. I’m so proud of her.” Nelson will graduate in December with a psychology degree, while also being interested in real estate development and hoping to play professional soccer. She trained with Royals goalkeeper Nicole Barnhart, labeling her a “legend.” Barnhart’s instruction helped her see the game better from the goalkeeper’s position on the field. Away from soccer, Nelson already had developed a clear vision of where she has been and where she is going.
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10065
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Tai chi may ease fibromyalgia pain
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"The story does two things better than all the other stories. It puts a dollar figure to the cost of tai chi therapy, and it gives people a better sense of how popular tai chi is. It could have done a better job evaluating the evidence and providing some absolute numbers to help readers decide how seriously to take these results. Why not just give the absolute numbers? How many out of how many? Why make the reader do the math? ""79% of tai chi participants said their symptoms had improved, compared with 39% of those in the educational class…Even three months after the classes ended, 82% of tai chi students still felt better, compared with 53% of the comparison group."" Sure, the denominators are in the story but we shouldn’t need to pull out the calculator to figure out 79% of x, vs. 39% of x."
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true
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"This is the only of the five stories to actually put a dollar figure on the classes. ""Even the cost of a class, which can top $50 a month, is modest compared with the cost of many medications. And unlike drugs, tai chi had no harmful side effects, she says."" Unlike the AP story, which made the mistake of saying that ""symptoms improved significantly for the tai chi group and little for the others,"" this story, at least, presents some numbers. The trouble is, those numbers are in relative terms. So, instead of saying that three months after the classes ended, 27 patients who took tai chi classes felt better and 17 who tried other therapies also felt better, it presents the difference as 82% versus 53%. That seems more dramatic. Absolute data would be more meaningful. Why make the reader do the math? The story is one of the few stories that covered this study to actually point out that ""unlike drugs, tai chi had no harmful side effects."" In the end, because of the comments from Gloria Yeh, the story puts the appropriate caveats on the findings. This sentence does a great job of summarizing some of the problems with the study: ""Yeh notes that researchers don’t know which aspects of tai chi were most helpful: the exercise, deep breathing, relaxation exercise, meeting new friends or learning from a charismatic teacher."" This story actually spends too little time talking about the condition itself. The AP devoted a whole paragraph in an eight paragaph story to the condition, and the LA Times led its piece by describing the disease. USA Today instead went with a very nice description of tai chi, putting the emphasis on the beauty and simiplicity of the therapy rather than the difficulty clinicians have had correctly diagnosing and treating fibromyalgia. This is the only story to include the phrase ""white crane spreads its wings"" or anything like that. The story doesn’t actually quote any of the authors and instead quotes two outside experts, one of whom wrote an accompanying editorial. It fails to fully attribute the comments made by ""Callahan."" It appears that the writer means Leigh F. Callahan, who just completed a study of tai chi for arthritis and was quoted by other reporters. (How did this slip through copy editing? Was this a slip-up only in the online version?) But we can’t give credit to an independent source that the story doesn’t adequately identify. The story does not compare the therapy to existing alternatives or even discuss existing alternatives, aside from a passing reference at the very end to medications. This is the only one of the five stories to note that ""A study in 2007 from the National Institutes of Health found that 2.3 million American adults had used tai chi in the past year."" This doesn’t tell you whether tai chi classes are as readily available in Oklahoma as they are in New Mexico, but it does give you a sense of how popular they are. It is unclear from this story whether tai chi has been studied before for other conditions. It has. It also is unclear what fibromyalgia patients now do for therapy. The LA Times, for example, pointed out that patients in the study stopped taking drugs for treatment, for example. The story does not rely on a news release."
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2124
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Study finds alcohol abuse a problem in UK forces.
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British troops in Afghanistan or Iraq are far more likely to become alcohol abusers back home than fellow troops, but levels of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are stable, psychiatrists said on Thursday.
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true
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Health News
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A large study by doctors from King’s College London found that rates of PTSD among British armed forces were stable at around 4 percent, but there were higher rates of common mental disorders such as anxiety and depression, and of alcohol misuse. “Our view is that alcohol misuse is actually a greater problem for the armed forces than PTSD,” said Simon Wessely of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s, who led the study. The researchers noted that studies in the United States had found high levels PTSD among veterans returning from active service, and said those findings had led some to predict Britain too would suffer a “tidal wave” of mental health problems. PTSD can stem from wartime trauma such as being wounded or seeing others hurt or killed. An estimated 180,000 troops have served in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. The British study, published in the Lancet medical journal, used data from almost 10,000 UK troops. It was funded by the Ministry of Defense, but the researchers stressed that ministers had no other involvement in the work. Around 4 percent suffered PTSD, 20 percent had symptoms of common mental disorders which would not normally need medical attention, and 13 percent were misusing alcohol, it found. But troops who had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan were 22 percent more likely to abuse alcohol than those who had not. “We’re not seeing this tidal wave of mental health problems, as was predicted, and (our findings) definitely don’t reflect what’s being seen in the U.S,” Nicola Fear, who also worked on the study, told a London briefing. Wessely, however, warned that while rates of trauma stress were low, the sheer numbers of British troops deployed in recent years meant “more and more people with mental health problems” would be coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. “Services that care for veterans are going to get busier and are going to get a higher workload,” he told the briefing. “The numbers will increase as long as the deployment continues.” “We will see more people — but that does not mean a catastrophic decline in mental health.” A large U.S. study in 2007 found that U.S. male military veterans were twice as likely to commit suicide than people who had never been in the military. Matthew Hotopf, also from King’s, said the differences between the U.S. and the UK were “quite striking” and may be due to the fact that U.S. troops often deploy for longer periods — up to 15 months, rather than the 6-month deployments usual for British forces. Fear said the team found no increased prevalence of PTSD in soldiers who had been deployed more than once, but they did find a slight rise in rates of stress disorder as the time since troops’ return from deployment increased. “The longer you have been back from deployment, the more likely you are to report symptoms of PTSD,” she said. But she said this was “a very small increase” — with the highest prevalence of PTSD reaching 6 percent in troops that had been back for up to 4 years.
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3706
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Samoa measles epidemic worsens with 24 children now dead.
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Authorities said Monday that a measles epidemic sweeping through Samoa continues to worsen with the death toll rising to 25, all but one of them young children.
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true
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Samoa, Health, Measles, General News, New Zealand, Epidemics
|
“We still have a big problem at hand,” Samoa’s Director General of Health Leausa Take Naseri said in a video statement. He said more than 140 new cases of people contracting the virus had been recorded within the past day, bringing the total to about 2,200 cases since the outbreak began last month. He said there are about 20 critically ill children who remain in hospital intensive care units. Samoa declared a state of emergency nine days ago, closing all its schools, banning children from public gatherings and mandating that everybody get vaccinated. Teams of people have been traveling the country administering thousands of vaccines. The government also shut down a private clinic and is investigating how hundreds of vaccines were taken without authorization and then sold for a fee. The median age of those who have died is 13 months, according to government figures. The deaths include 24 children under the age of 5, 11 of whom were infants under 12 months. The other person who died was in their 30s. In all, 679 people have been admitted to Samoan hospitals with the disease, accounting for two-thirds of all recent hospital admissions. A majority have been discharged, with about 183 remaining in hospitals. “These hospitals are not designed to deal with this,” Dr. Scott Wilson told Newshub in the capital, Apia. “The minute you get hospitals running at 200 to 300 percent capacity — I think it speaks for itself. It’s incredibly serious.” Figures from the World Health Organization and UNICEF indicate that measles immunization rates among Samoan infants have fallen steeply from over 70% in 2013 to under 30% last year. Helen Petousis-Harris, a vaccine expert at New Zealand’s University of Auckland, said the Samoan government halted its immunization program for several months last year after two infants died from a medical mishap involving a vaccine. Tonga, Fiji and New Zealand have also reported outbreaks of measles but on a smaller scale than in Samoa. American Samoa, which has declared a public health emergency, is requiring that travelers from Samoa and Tonga prove they have been vaccinated or are immune from measles before being allowed into the U.S. territory.
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19733
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Taxes on groceries and medicine will rise under a plan to improve roads and rail for metro Atlanta.
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Transportatioplan tax foe says plan hikes prices on food, medicine
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true
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Georgia, Transportation, Vincent Fort,
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"Opponents of a 1 percent sales tax to overhaul the region’s roads and rail are saying the plan will make it harder for metro Atlantans to buy the things they need the most. It’s downright unfair, said state Sen. Vincent Fort, a Democrat who represents a district that stretches from East Point through parts of Atlanta. The proposal goes before voters on Tuesday. ""We shouldn't be putting a sales tax on people's food and medicine,"" Fort said in a television news story that aired on CBS Atlanta (WGCL-TV) on July 21. Your PolitiFact Georgia reporters have vetted nearly two dozen claims about the upcoming penny-per-dollar tax, which would raise an estimated $8.5 billion (after inflation) for transportation projects over the next 10 years. But we hadn’t heard Fort’s claim. Will the transportation tax really increase taxes on food and medicine? ""It’s not in dispute,"" Fort told PolitiFact Georgia. Fort said his statement referred to groceries and over-the-counter medicine, and that he was uncertain whether prescription drugs would be taxed under the plan. Later, he called us back to say that a legislative staffer informed him that prescription drugs were exempt. We reviewed state law and consulted with a spokesman for the Georgia Department of Revenue to check Fort’s account. The tax referendum was born out of Georgia’s Transportation Investment Act of 2010, otherwise known as House Bill 277. The bill divided the state into 12 regions so that voters could decide whether to add a 1 percent sales tax to pay for local transportation system upgrades. These regional taxes would have to meet certain criteria, the bill said. One is that the tax would apply to the sale of food and beverages. The sale of ""food and food ingredients to an individual consumer for off-premises human consumption"" is exempted from the state’s sales tax, but local governments may tax it. Another criteria is that other existing sales tax exemptions would apply. Under current state law, prescription drugs are exempt. The transportation plan would therefore impose a regional tax on groceries such as a loaf of bread or bananas. It also would tax over-the-counter medications such as the aspirin you took for the headache you got from listening to the transportation debate rhetoric. But prescription drugs would remain tax-free. While the bill specifies that groceries will be taxed, it makes sure other items are not. Jet fuel is exempt, as is fuel used for off-road, heavy-duty equipment or locomotives. So are motor fuel and energy used during manufacturing. Fort’s claim holds up well. ""Food and medicine"" would be taxed under the new plan, just not prescription drugs. Fort got the important stuff right, but he could have been a little more precise and said ""non-prescription medicine."" Still, he earns a ."
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8456
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Lockdowns should be lifted in two-week stages to stem COVID-19 spread: WHO.
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Countries that ease restrictions imposed to fight the spread of the coronavirus should wait at least two weeks to evaluate the impact of such changes before easing again, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday.
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true
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Health News
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In its latest Strategy Update, the U.N. agency said that the world stands at a “pivotal juncture” in the pandemic and that “speed, scale, and equity must be our guiding principles” when deciding what measures are necessary. Every country should implement comprehensive public health measures to maintain a sustainable steady state of low-level or no transmission and prepare its surge capacity to react rapidly to control any spread, the WHO said. Some of the countries hardest-hit by the virus are now considering lifting lockdowns and beginning the transition toward a resumption of normal life. The WHO update said any such steps should be taken gradually, with time to evaluate their impact before new steps are taken. “To reduce the risk of new outbreaks, measures should be lifted in a phased, step-wise manner based on an assessment of the epidemiological risks and socioeconomic benefits of lifting restrictions on different workplaces, educational institutions, and social activities...,” the WHO said. “Ideally there would be a minimum of 2 weeks (corresponding to the incubation period of COVID-19) between each phase of the transition, to allow sufficient time to understand the risk of new outbreaks and to respond appropriately,” it added. It warned that the “risk of re-introduction and resurgence of the disease will continue”. The Geneva-based global health organisation issued its advice at a time when it has come under criticism from the United States for its initial response to the pandemic. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday Washington, the WHO’s biggest donor, would suspend funding. China has begun lifting some of the toughest restrictions imposed on Hubei province where the disease first emerged at the end of last year. In the United States, which has the largest number of confirmed cases and deaths, Trump has jostled with some state governors over who has the authority to begin reopening U.S. businesses. European countries have begun small-scale steps to reduce severe lockdowns. Some Spanish businesses, including construction and manufacturing, have been allowed to resume, although shops, bars and public spaces are to stay closed until at least April 26. Italy, which has the world’s second-highest death toll at 21,067, maintained some tight restrictions on movement, while Denmark, one of the first European countries to shut down, will reopen daycare centres and schools for children in first to fifth grades on Wednesday.
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10732
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Omega-3 margarines fail to help in heart study
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European investors representing over six trillion euros in assets are calling on European Union governments to speed up efforts to enshrine the EU’s 2050 climate neutrality goal in law.
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true
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In a letter, 44 firms, including Allianz, Handelsbanken, Aberdeen Investment and Aegon NV, said a law would give investors more confidence to make long-term decisions on environmentally responsible projects. The move showcases investors’ increased focus on climate change, both as a risk and an opportunity. Quoting the “catastrophic” impact of ignoring the issue, the group said uncontrolled climate change could cost the global economy $23 trillion. “Conversely, greater action on climate change could deliver $26 trillion in global economic benefit by 2030,” the letter, released Friday, said. Most of the 28 EU member states have signed up to an EU-wide pledge to be climate neutral by 2050 but Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are dragging their feet. A law would force all member states to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Ursula von der Leyen, the new president of the European Union’s executive Commission, has made combating climate change one of her top priorities. She has unveiled a “Sustainable Europe Investment Plan” which would support one trillion euros in investment over the next decade, and pledged to turn the 2050 target, something that will require a near-complete phasing-out of fossil fuels, into the “first European Climate Law.”
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15819
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The Iranian parliament will get to say yes or no on this deal, and I think the United States Congress should have the exact same input into the process.
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"Johnson said, ""The Iranian parliament will get to say yes or no"" on the nuclear deal. This is incorrect on two accounts. Experts said the nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran won’t require ratification by Iran’s parliament, the Islamic Consultative Assembly. It’s possible the deal will be contingent on Iran’s ratification of a previous international nuclear agreement, which might require the assembly’s approval, but the body won’t weigh in on the deal currently being worked on. And even if it did, it would be entirely symbolic, as the assembly is heavily influenced by the Supreme Leader on foreign policy matters."
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false
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National, Foreign Policy, Nuclear, Ron Johnson,
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"Republican Sen. Ron Johnson wants President Barack Obama to seek Congress’ approval before finalizing a deal with Iran, an agreement that would halt the country’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for sanction relief. Obama has argued that since the agreement is not a treaty, Congress’ approval isn’t needed. But Johnson, R-Wis., one of 47 GOP senators who signed a controversial letter to Iran critical of the negotiations, isn’t buying it. ""The Iranian parliament will get to say yes or no on this deal,"" Johnson said March 8, ""and I think the United States Congress should have the exact same input into the process."" It’s a curious comparison, but is it accurate? We decided to check. You can look at this through two lenses: What does Iran’s Constitution literally say about the duties of the parliament, called the Islamic Consultative Assembly or the Majles? And in practice, what responsibilities does the parliament actually have in an authoritarian regime heavily controlled by the Supreme Leader and the unelected 12-member Guardian Council? The Iran Constitution The Iranian parliament is made up of 290 elected officials. Their duties are outlined in the country’s Constitution. There are some strict limitations on the body’s power. For example, it ""cannot enact laws contrary to the usual and ahkam (the Islamic commandments) of the official religion of the country or to the Constitution."" The Guardian Council determines if a law is in violation and it often overturns legislation in the name of Islam or the constitution. But the Constitution does bestow some broad powers on the assembly. Article 77 says, ""International treaties, protocols, contracts, and agreements must be approved by the Islamic Consultative Assembly."" That would seem to be a point for Johnson, right? Not necessarily. Just as the White House contends that the agreement is not a treaty and therefore not subject to congressional approval, Obama’s National Security Council says the deal would not fall under ""international treaties, protocols, contracts and agreements"" in the Iranian Constitution. Experts agreed. ""The Iranian parliament has the authority to ratify treaties, but a possible nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 will be a political agreement, not a treaty,"" said Alireza Nader, a senior policy analyst at RAND Corporation. ""The Majles can debate the agreement, but it is unlikely to vote yes or no on it. The political establishment, including the Supreme Leader, president, etc., will have the critical voice."" There is one aspect of the agreement that may need approval from Iran’s parliament. The Joint Plan of Action for reaching an agreement says that the final step to a comprehensive solution is contingent on Iran ratifying and implementing the ""additional protocol."" What’s that? Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran signed, member countries must abide to standards set forth by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In 2003, the agency approved additional protocols for Iran so the agency could monitor Iran’s nuclear sites. While Iran temporarily abided by the additional protocol, it has since stopped, and it never ratified the agreement. If Iran wants the United States to lift its economic sanctions, it must ratify that agreement, which would require action by Iran’s parliament. A 'dead letter'? Johnson’s staff pointed us to a report on Iran’s parliament from the United States Institute of Peace. It noted that the Islamic Consultative Assembly has ""forced a degree of accountability on the executive branch through its powers over the budget, confirmation or impeachment of ministers, and interpellation,"" and that ""has long served as the one public outlet for political differences."" ""By Middle East standards, the persistence and vitality of Iran’s Majles has been somewhat remarkable,"" the report said, especially as a vehicle for local cultural and economic debate. But the same report also noted how toothless the body is, particularly on foreign policy. Every candidate that runs for parliament is vetted by the Guardian Council. As it is, turnover is constant, and dissenters don’t last long. And unelected leaders often get around the body’s legislative role or strong arm the assembly, particularly on nuclear issues, the report said. Put bluntly, any power the Constitution grants the parliament is a ""dead letter,"" said Matthew Kroenig, co-author of The Handbook of National Legislatures: A Global Survey. ""It is inconceivable that the Iranian parliament would stand in the way of an agreement that had the support of the government and the Supreme Leader,"" said Kroenig, professor of international relations at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Johnson’s office noted that already Iran’s parliament voted on the nuclear negotiations. That came on Jan. 6, when the Islamic Consultative Assembly held a vote on the government’s handling of the nuclear negotiations. But the assembly ultimately sided with the regime and the vote had no repercussions tied to it anyway. The parliament is under ""heavy influence of the Supreme Leader, and in recent years has not acted against his interests,"" Nader said. Our ruling Johnson said, ""The Iranian parliament will get to say yes or no"" on the nuclear deal. This is incorrect on two accounts. Experts said the nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran won’t require ratification by Iran’s parliament, the Islamic Consultative Assembly. It’s possible the deal will be contingent on Iran’s ratification of a previous international nuclear agreement, which might require the assembly’s approval, but the body won’t weigh in on the deal currently being worked on. And even if it did, it would be entirely symbolic, as the assembly is heavily influenced by the Supreme Leader on foreign policy matters."
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12514
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"If you’re getting your insurance through (your employer), nothing changes"" under Trumpcare."
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Blum said for people who get their insurance through their employer, the American Health Care Act changes nothing. The experts we reached said that there actually is a way that the GOP bill could affect employer plans. States could decide to trim the list of essential health services. Employers could still offer a fuller range of services, but the extra ones wouldn’t be subject to the rules that protect households against massive medical bills. No expert said this was certain to happen. Right now, it is a legal possibility. The end of the employer mandate also changes the rules for large employers, ending penalties for those that don’t offer insurance. But for different reasons, the impact is uncertain. Blum's statement is partially accurate but leaves out important information.
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mixture
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National, Health Care, Rod Blum,
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"Rep. Rod Blum, R-Iowa, faced a feisty crowd at a high school gymnasium in Dubuque when voters in his district pressed him on his vote for the House Republican health care bill, the American Health Care Act. Blum aimed to put the bill’s changes into perspective. ""This bill, Trumpcare — whatever you want to call it — is about the individual market only,"" he said May 8. ""That’s 12,000 people in my district. So if you’re in the group health insurance program through your employers, if you’re getting your insurance through the group health insurance, nothing changes."" In this fact-check, we look at whether the House GOP measure changes nothing in employer-based plans. In reality, the bill does change the rules in a couple of ways that could affect employer plans. But the impact is far from certain. Core benefits One of the changes has to do with a key amendment authored by Rep. Tom MacArthur, R-N.J. It gives states the option to pick their own list of ""essential health benefits,"" the services that every plan must provide. Under the Affordable Care Act, that list includes 10 services, from hospitalization to prescription drugs to pediatric care and more. Under the American Health Care Act, states could apply for waivers to drop some items from that list. Some common examples are maternity care or mental health, services that weren’t always part of insurance plans before the Affordable Care Act took effect. Blum’s spokesman Paul Smith told us it is wrong to focus on the MacArthur waivers. Blum ""was speaking about the large-group market, not the small-group market where the MacArthur waivers could potentially apply,"" Smith said. Smith is correct that the amendment only addresses the individual and small-group markets. But that doesn’t settle the question. First, Blum spoke about employer-based insurance generally. The distinction between small- and large-group plans might have been lost on his audience. Yet even if he was thinking about large employer plans, which cover about 110 million people nationwide, health law analysts say the Republican bill could touch those plans and those people, too. The link between the list of benefits and financial protection The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, has two financial cushions for people. It bans annual and lifetime limits on coverage and requires insurance companies to put a cap on how much a person needs to pay out-of-pocket. In theory, no matter how big the medical bills get, they won’t drive someone into bankruptcy. The important thing is, both protections apply only to services on the essential benefits list. There’s another wrinkle. Companies that offer insurance through a large-group or a self-insurance plan are not required to provide every service on the essential benefits list, but for any item on that list that they do offer, those financial protections kick in. With that, we get to the significance of the MacArthur amendment. No one knows how many states will want to trim the essential benefits list, but the possibility could create some new options for the larger plans. ""Employers could choose to base the plans they offer on a definition of essential health benefits that is considerably weaker than the current one,"" Matt Fiedler, a health studies fellow at the Brookings Institution, said. Fiedler said any service not on a state’s list is not subject to the financial protections of no yearly or lifetime limits. Health law professor Allison Hoffman at UCLA gave the hypothetical case of maternity and newborn care. ""If the American Health Care Act becomes law, a state might define essential health benefits not to include maternity and newborn care,"" Hoffman said. ""Then, an employer could once again cap them."" Neither Fiedler nor Hoffman said that this would definitely happen; only that it could happen. Thomas Miller, a health law fellow at the market-oriented American Enterprise Institute, doesn’t argue the point. But Miller does downplay the significance. ""It's not unusual for the first round of voting on bills with recently revised amendments to fail to connect and integrate fully with pre-existing law,"" Miller said. He described this intersection between the MacArthur amendment and current regulations, an ""indirect bankshot"" that has nothing to do with the amendment’s purpose or intent. Miller and Fiedler said the problem could be avoided through new regulations. End of the employer mandate Under the American Health Care Act, no one must buy insurance, nor do employers have to offer it. Fiedler called this change ""clear and unambiguous."" ""The Congressional Budget Office projected that there would be a change in behavior,"" Fiedler said. The CBO didn’t look at the individual and employer mandates separately, but in its initial assessment of the House Republican bill, it said eliminating both would ""substantially reduce the number of people with health insurance coverage."" Miller noted that since large employers regularly offer insurance in order to compete for workers, keeping or ending the mandate would make little difference. Our ruling Blum said for people who get their insurance through their employer, the American Health Care Act changes nothing. The experts we reached said that there actually is a way that the GOP bill could affect employer plans. States could decide to trim the list of essential health services. Employers could still offer a fuller range of services, but the extra ones wouldn’t be subject to the rules that protect households against massive medical bills. No expert said this was certain to happen. Right now, it is a legal possibility. The end of the employer mandate also changes the rules for large employers, ending penalties for those that don’t offer insurance. But for different reasons, the impact is uncertain. Blum's statement is partially accurate but leaves out important information. Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Dubuque."
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3559
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Vikings unveil community food truck to serve hungry youth.
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Dalvin Cook’s rookie year was dominated by his rehabilitation from reconstructive knee surgery, and his second season included recuperation from a significant hamstring strain. The arduous process of recovery from injuries quickly made the Minnesota Vikings running back realize the necessity of eating right.
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true
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Nutrition, Health, NFL, Minnesota, Dalvin Cook
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When he entered the NFL, Cook could hardly have envisioned spinach as the centerpiece of one of his meals. Now, he’s made youth nutrition his chief charitable cause, trying to help kids embrace the value of healthy foods. “I just started seeing some of the stuff I was eating, and I was like, ‘I never would’ve had this two years ago,’” Cook said. “So just imagine if I was 10 years old? Just to give them a jump-start on how to do things, to get a message out there and show them how it’s supposed to be done.” Education is one thing, but access is another. When school is out, especially in the summer, many children in low-income households can find meals harder to come by. The Boys & Girls Club of the Twin Cities works with about 9,000 kids, with 90% of them eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, according to senior director of corporate and public relations Tim Schober. Vikings chief operating officer Kevin Warren saw his own awareness rise when his daughter, Peri, founded a food delivery business to bring healthy food to underserved residents of the north side of Minneapolis. “I didn’t quite understand the level of it until I helped her deliver food a couple times on weekends,” Warren said. “There are people right here in our touchpoint that are really struggling, that don’t eat healthy, and it impacts every area of their life.” When the Vikings relaunched their philanthropic arm in 2017, they prioritized childhood hunger, fitness and achievement gaps, with a goal of actively creating their own programs in partnership with local nonprofits rather than the old model of simply issuing grants. The first major initiative was a food truck to serve nutritious meals to needy kids in the area, in conjunction with organizations already addressing food access. This custom-built, converted recreational vehicle energized by rooftop solar panels was unveiled on Thursday. It’s called Vikings Table . “You think about developing countries having hunger issues, but it exists in our own backyard,” said Vikings Foundation executive director Brett Taber. “Food trucks are very popular, so this eliminates some of that social stigma of receiving a free meal.” The association with the local professional football team helps, too. “With the Vikings being involved, it gives it a different feel,” Schober said. “Now, it’s a big special event and everyone is participating and you can take some of the potential embarrassment away.” The concept is similar to an “eye mobile” the Eagles Charitable Foundation has deployed in the Philadelphia area since 1996 to offer free eye exams and prescription glasses to needy children . Boosted by a seven-figure pledge from Xcel Energy, the project also will be funded by sales from the food truck with a separate menu at Vikings games, training camp practices and other events. Profits will be directed back to the summer youth meal service. The back of the truck has an 80-inch monitor to show videos about healthy eating. Local food truck entrepreneurs Tony and Haley Fritz will be operating, maintaining and staffing the truck. “The hope is to have some kind of an effect on people. It’s kind of an event so they want to be a part of that,” Haley Fritz said. “We’re trying to say: ‘Hey, this is cool. The Vikings eat turkey tacos, too.’ The hope is that they just keep us overly busy and we just keep feeding as many people as we can.” ___ More AP NFL coverage: https://apnews.com/NFL and https://twitter.com/AP_NFL
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Stent procedure reduces stay to repair aneurysm
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This is an unbalanced story on the supposed benefits of the use of a stent to repair an aortic aneurysm. The risk of an untreated aneurysm which the reader is told “can burst, causing severe back pain and often death within minutes” is not contrasted with the risks of having had an aneurysm treated. There was no mention of the potential harms of using a stent. There was also no mention of costs. The only framework for the story is provided by a single source – a local surgeon who performs the procedure. The story needed at least one other independent source. The patient who was profiled is said to be an individual in his 80s and in poor health. The evidence to support the statement that the procedure “saved his life” is unclear. It is also worth noting that most aortic aneurysms are abdominal and screening for them is not only considered ineffective, but the best therapy is unclear.
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false
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No mention of costs; article explained that no routine scans are typically done for the underlying anomaly because Medicare won’t cover chest X-rays for this purpose. Estimate of death rate from the procedure is presumably for death immediately following the procedure. No data on the benefit from the treatment (symptom relief, longevity improvement, quality of life or quality of death) No mention of harms from the procedure. Where does the mortality data on the use of the stent come from? How many people have these aneurysms? Is there a range of severity? No discussion of the natural history of these problems. The only source is a surgeon who does this procedure; no other independent opinion is included. Mentions open heart surgery to fix an aneurysm with a 30-50% mortality rate. Data presented for this procedure, thoracic endoprosthesis, is 1-5% death rate. However this difference may be explained by a difference in patient populations. Mentions new device approval by the FDA for use to fix “a bulging artery near the heart”. Mentions that this device is similar to that of a heart stent placed in the aorta to repair an aneurysm (i.e. not innovative, but a new ‘model’ and application).
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9051
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High doses of vitamin D rapidly reduce arterial stiffness
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Getty Images With just a few tweaks, this could have been a stellar release on a small study about the benefits of high doses of vitamin D on arterial stiffness. Arterial stiffness is a cause of atherosclerosis, a thickening and stiffening of the arterial wall, and is related to high blood pressure or hypertension. The release presents many of the necessary caveats, avoids disease mongering and unjustifiable language, and does a nice job describing what the researchers did to reach their conclusions. The release also does readers a service by explaining a relatively complex topic in terms that regular readers (and journalists) can understand. The actual number of people who saw a benefit is missing, though, as is any mention of harms, any mention of other treatments for arterial stiffness, and any mention of how the study was funded or whether there were any conflicts of interest. We gave the release three stars because we felt these were mostly benign omissions. But, in the interest of keeping a high standard for writing strong scientific news releases, we make note of the omissions where they occurred. The benefits of daily supplement vitamins are under more scrutiny than ever because of repeated large scale studies that show minimal if any health effects. This raises the bar for researchers wanting to present a persuasive case for the benefits of vitamin D or any other vitamin.
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arterial stiffness,Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University,vitamin D
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The release responsibly notes that obtaining more vitamin D is a potentially simple endeavor for most individuals. They can drink more milk, for example, or purchase a relatively inexpensive supplement. The release quantifies the benefits in each group with this statement: “Two thousand IUs decreased stiffness by 2 percent in that timeframe. At 600 IUs, arterial stiffness actually increased slightly – .1 percent – and the placebo group experienced a 2.3 percent increase in arterial stiffness over the timeframe.” But we’re concerned that the release did not describe any of the statistical testing results. The 2% decrease seen by the group that got 2,000 units per day was not statistically significant. Nor was there a statistical significance in any group that received smaller doses. A difference was only seen in the group that got the highest dose of 4,000 units per day. That distinction was not made clear. Further, what does a 2% decrease in arterial stiffness mean in terms that would matter to a patient? The 2% decrease in reduced stiffness is a proxy or surrogate marker for a health outcome, but not one that tells us the actual impact on patient health. On the plus side, the release explains that the study consisted of 70 participants, and that those taking the most vitamin D showed the greatest reduction in arterial stiffness — 10.4 percent in 4 months — but it does not say how many participants that was. The study does make it clear, however. The high-dose group included 18 people. The release does not delve into the side effects of taking high doses of vitamin D over a long period of time. These side effects include kidney stones, which should have been addressed. The study does note, though, that no side effects were reported in the trial. The release does not make any bold claims about the efficacy of using vitamin D to treat arterial stiffness, but sticks to reporting the facts of the study as they are known. It cites the researchers calling for a larger study: “Now it’s time to do a larger-scale study, particularly in high-risk populations, and follow participants’ progress for longer periods, Dong and Raed say. “A year would give us even more data and ideas,” Raed adds.” The researchers essentially say that results are encouraging and the results were published in the journal PLOS ONE. The authors note that the connection between vitamin D and arterial stiffness “might be potential contributors” to heart disease in a certain subset of African Americans. The release does not hype the dangers of vitamin D deficiency or even heart disease in general, mentioning once and low in the release that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. The release does not mention any particular funding source. The release does not discuss any other options patients might have for dealing with arterial stiffness. It does note, however, that there are easy and inexpensive ways to add vitamin D to a person’s diet. The release makes clear that it would be simple for almost anyone seeking to increase their vitamin D intake to do so. They can drink more milk, eat more yogurt, eat more greens like kale, take a supplement and so forth. The release does not overplay its hand here, but does say that the study is “what appears to be the first randomized trial of its kind.” This is a difficult fact to establish but since they are essentially saying, “To the best of our knowledge” this is a first, we’ll give the release the benefit of the doubt here. The tone of the release is carefully measured throughout, with the writer repeatedly using language like “might” and “appears to be.”
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10028
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The Cutting Edge: Amazing Journey Inside the Brain
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"Brain disorders such as brain tumors, dementia and epilepsy are common and vexing health problems. Advances in imaging have helped identify these problems earlier and in some cases, such as certain kinds of stroke, finding these problems fast and treating them appropriately can significantly improve outcomes. This story reports on an experimental new kind of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) that uses special coils to get higher quality pictures of the brain than was previously possible with traditional MRI. However, the story does not describe the cost of the device, or of MRIs in general. The story also assumes insurance will cover it without providing any justification for this claim. Nor does the story quantify the benefits (known or unknown) of the device. The story also does not mention any harms of the device. While MRIs are very safe, the story could have mentioned that the device may find small abnormalities that would never go on to cause a problem, potentially leading to unnecessary treatments. While the story does not exaggerate the seriousness of brain disorders such as brain tumors, seizure disorders and dementia, it does repeatedly exaggerate how well they could potentially respond to early detection and treatment. The story reports that this device ""produces much clearer and faster images of the brain that could someday save your life."" In reality, unfortunately, it isn’t clear at all that any of the conditions mentioned in the story can actually be helped. The story could have been improved by quoting more experts. The story only quotes one expert – Bruce Rosen – who is biased because he is invested in the development of the device. Most importantly, the story does not comment on the available evidence to support the use of the device. The story provides one case study of a patient with seizures but this is not adequate information for the viewer. Furthermore, the story makes many claims that the device can help better treat many brain conditions, however it is not clear that early detection can do anything for certain disorders such as dementia."
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false
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"The story does not describe the cost of the device, or of MRIs in general. The story also assumes insurance will cover it without providing any justification. The story does not quantify the benefits of the device nor does it comment on the lack of data available to be able to quantify the benefits. The story mentions no harms of the device. While MRIs are very safe, the story could have mentioned that the device may find small abnormalities that would never go on to cause a problem, potentially leading to unnecessary treatments. The story does not comment on the available evidence to support the use of the device. The story provides one case study of a patient with seizures but this is not adequate information for the viewer. Furthermore, the story makes many claims that the device can help better treat many brain conditions, however it is not clear that early detection can do anything for certain disorders such as dementia. While the story does not exaggerate the seriousness of brain disorders such as brain tumors, seizure disorders and dementia, it does repeatedly exaggerate how well they respond to early detection and treatment. The story reports that this device ""produces much clearer and faster images of the brain that could someday save your life."" In reality, unfortunately, it isn’t clear at all that any of the conditions mentioned in the story can actually be helped. The story quotes only one expert – Bruce Rosen – who is biased because he is involved in developing the technology. The story mentions other imaging tests as the alternative – standard MRIs and CT scans. The story mentions that the device is not currently available but should be in the next few years. The story should have provided more justification for this claim. The story accurately represents the novelty of the device. There is no way to know if the story relied on a press release as the sole source of information."
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18938
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Connecticut has the fifth toughest gun control laws in the country, including an assault weapons ban that bans 35 different weapons.
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Kingston makes issue of Connecticut's gun control laws
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true
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Georgia, Guns, Jack Kingston,
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"Even ardent gun rights supporters are willing to talk gun control in the wake of the deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. During a Dec. 18 grilling by MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts, U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston said gun control should be ""up for discussion"" alongside violent video games and mental health. The Savannah Republican was endorsed by the National Rifle Association in 2012 and received an A+ grade from the group. Changing gun laws may not be the answer, though. ""Connecticut has the fifth toughest gun control laws in the country, including an assault weapons ban that bans 35 different weapons,"" Kingston said. A Kingston spokesman did not reply to our request for more information, so we searched for state-by-state comparisons of gun control laws and reviewed Connecticut’s assault weapons statute. The term ""assault weapon"" is controversial. Various state laws use the phrase, although the National Rifle Association argues that gun control advocates created it to ""trick the public into believing that ‘assault weapons’ were fully-automatic machine guns used by the military,"" its website says. There’s no formal definition for what counts as an assault weapon. Laws describing them vary. In general, the term refers to a semi-automatic firearm that resembles a fully automatic one or those used by militaries. Connecticut law generally bans the sale, transfer or possession of assault weapons. State statute defines them in two ways: Connecticut’s law lists 37 guns, not 35, so Kingston’s not far from the mark. Technically speaking, the statute is written so that firearms outside the list can be prohibited, but this is a minor problem. What about Connecticut’s ranking? The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence uses a point system to rank states based on whether their statutes met the group’s standards on curbing firearm trafficking; background checks; child safety requirements and other factors. Connecticut’s laws were ranked the fifth strongest in the nation in 2011, the group’s most recent list. It was bested by California, New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York. Georgia tied for 22nd. The nutmeg state scored well consistently. We checked the rankings back to 2007 and found it made the top five each time. Still, Connecticut’s 58 points lagged well behind first place California, which earned 81 points. The state’s assault weapons ban was one reason why. It earned only three out of a possible 10 points because magazines that carry more than 10 rounds remain legal there. Also, the Brady Campaign prefers a different definition for an assault weapon. ""While it’s the state with the fifth strongest gun laws, obviously, at 58 points out of 100, there’s a lot more the state can do,"" said Brian Malte, a spokesman for the group. We found that groups that push for tougher gun laws consistently give Connecticut high marks. For instance, the San Francisco-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence ranked Connecticut fourth in its 2012 report, and fifth in 2010. It assigns points to each state based on 29 aspects of gun law, including the sale and transfer of firearms, owner responsibilities, and rules on their handling in public places. The center Georgia ranked 24th in 2012. And Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which boasts membership of more than 700 mayors, including Atlanta’s Kasim Reed, issued a 2010 report that compared states based on whether they enacted 10 key types of gun laws. Connecticut had put nine of the 10 types in place. Only New York and New Jersey received a 10 out of 10. Georgia had enacted two. Our conclusion: Kingston is right on this one. Connecticut consistently ranks high in lists of states with stringent gun laws, and literally ranked fifth in recent rankings by the Brady Campaign and the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Furthermore, he’s pretty close on the number of assault weapons banned in Connecticut law. Kingston earns a ."
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27752
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A bison calf was euthanized at Yellowstone National Park after well-meaning tourists put it in their car to keep it warm.
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After well-meaning tourists put a calf into their vehicle to keep it warm, but rangers were unable to reunite the animal with its herd.
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true
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Critter Country, Animal Welfare, bison, yellowstone national park
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In May 2016, well-meaning tourists at Yellowstone National Park put a bison calf into their car and drove it to a ranger station because they thought that the animal was cold. A few days later, park rangers had to euthanize the calf after it was repeatedly rejected by its herd: Yellowstone bison calf euthanized after father & son brought it in car, thinking it was cold https://t.co/JFZIIzF7fE pic.twitter.com/vNVQy5Yd30 — CNN (@CNN) May 16, 2016 While the people may have had good intentions, their actions ultimately led to the bison’s death: Last week in Yellowstone National Park, visitors were cited for placing a newborn bison calf in their vehicle and transporting it to a park facility because of their misplaced concern for the animal’s welfare. In terms of human safety, this was a dangerous activity because adult animals are very protective of their young and will act aggressively to defend them. In addition, interference by people can cause mothers to reject their offspring. In this case, park rangers tried repeatedly to reunite the newborn bison calf with the herd. These efforts failed. The bison calf was later euthanized because it was abandoned and causing a dangerous situation by continually approaching people and cars along the roadway. Yellowstone explained the decision to euthanize the bison calf on social media: In order to ship the calf out of the park, it would have had to go through months of quarantine to be monitored for brucellosis. No approved quarantine facilities exist at this time, and we don’t have the capacity to care for a calf that’s too young to forage on its own. Nor is it the mission of the National Park Service to rescue animals: our goal is to maintain the ecological processes of Yellowstone. Even though humans were involved in this case, it is not uncommon for bison, especially young mothers, to lose or abandon their calves. Those animals typically die of starvation or predation. […] The management of wild animals sometimes requires decisions that may seem harsh if you focus on an individual. But when you focus on populations of animals, and the ecological processes that sustain them, things like a bison losing or abandoning a calf is part of the fabric this ecosystem. It’s unfortunate that these visitors intervened: the calf may have been found by its mother, but it’s also likely that the calf would have died naturally of starvation or predation. While the park stopped short of blaming the visitors to the park (and didn’t clarify whether the calf had already been ill or abandoned by its herd before it was placed in a car), the National Park Service also called on visitors to follow rules in order to ensure the safety of both humans and wildlife: Approaching wild animals can drastically affect their well-being and, in this case, their survival. Park regulations require that you stay at least 25 yards (23 m) away from all wildlife (including bison, elk and deer) and at least 100 yards (91 m) away from bears and wolves. Disregarding these regulations can result in fines, injury, and even death. The safety of these animals, as well as human safety, depends on everyone using good judgment and following these simple rules. The tourist who put the calf in his SUV was later cited for violating those rules.
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4635
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Omaha Science Cafe to focus on Lou Gehrig’s disease.
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The next Omaha Science Cafe will discuss issues involving Lou Gehrig’s disease.
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true
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Omaha, Nebraska, Lou Gehrigs disease, Science
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Amy Nordness, director of speech-language pathology at the Munroe-Meyer Institute for Genetics and Rehabilitation at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and Shannon Todd, a care services specialist with The ALS Association Mid-America Chapter, will lead the discussion. The title: “The Eyes Have It — How the Eyes Keep People with ALS Connected to the World.” The disease claimed famed New York Yankee Lou Gehrig. Its medical name: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord and is characterized by progressive muscle weakness. The event is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. Aug. 14 at the Slowdown. Science Cafés involve face-to-face conversations with scientists about current science topics.
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39293
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Religious groups have raised concerns that the ALS Association, which has seen an overwhelming influx of donations through its ice bucket challenge, supports embryonic stem cell research to help find a cure for the degenerative neurological condition.
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ALS Association Supports Embryonic Stem Cell Research
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true
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Medical, Miscellaneous
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The ALS Association funds one study that uses embryonic stem cell research, according to an August 23, 2014, article by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The ALS Association said that the research was funded by “one specific donor who is committed to this area of research.” Additionally, the ALS Association said donors were able to stipulate that they do not want their donations used to fund any stem cell research, if they so choose. Human embryonic stem cell lines that are used in research come from embryos that were left over from in vitro fertilization, or from embryos that carry genetic mutations like cystic fibrosis or Tay Sachs disease, according to the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine’s website. After a couple completes the in vitro fertilization process, they either continue paying for the leftover embryos to remain frozen or allow them to thaw, which destroys the cells. Couples in some states, however, also have the choice to donate the embryos to research or adoptive families, according to the institute. “The discovery that human embryonic stem cells can be isolated and propagated in culture with the potential of developing into all tissues of the body is a major medical breakthrough. However it has raised a great deal of ethical questions,” the ALS Association said on its website. Posted 08/25/14 Comments
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24483
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"An Iowa policy ""provides for a state round up of Iowa citizens who might be exposed to the swine flu virus."
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E-mail claims Iowa policy seeks to round up Iowans who might be exposed to the swine flu
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false
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National, Health Care, Chain email,
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"Patty Quinlisk, medical director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, has been amazed by the amount of misinformation and blatant lies swirling around about the H1N1 virus and the federal plans to distribute a vaccine. But even she was a bit thrown when a man called last month and asked her whether Iowa was creating concentration camps for people with H1N1. Seriously. ""We don't have concentration camps here in Iowa,"" she said. And then she sighed. ""Those are words I never thought I'd have to say."" The rumor spread wide enough that the Iowa Department of Public Health felt the need to isssue a press release on Aug. 31 to knock it down. We're not sure what version of the chain e-mail the department got, but here at PolitiFact, a reader sent us one that claimed, ""The state of Iowa has an internal document that was recently leaked on the Internet that ... provides for a state round up of Iowa citizens who might be exposed to the swine flu virus."" The e-mail links to a ""Facility Quarantine Order."" It's a legitimate document, a template to be used in the event that Iowa ever did decide to quarantine people. It reads, in part: ""The Iowa Department of Public Health (Department) has determined that you have had contact with a person with Novel Influenza A H1N1. Novel Influenza A H1N1 is a disease which is spread from person to person and is associated with fever (greater than 100.0 F), cough, sore throat, rhinorrhea (runny nose), nasal congestion, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue. Novel Influenza A H1N1 presents a risk of serious harm to public health and if it spreads in the community severe public health consequences may result. ""The Department has determined that it is necessary to quarantine your movement to a specific facility to prevent further spread of this disease. The Department has determined that quarantine in your home and other less restrictive alternatives are not acceptable because — insert the reason home quarantine is not acceptable, the person violated a previously issued home quarantine order, the person does not have an appropriate home setting conducive to home quarantine, etc. The Department is therefore ordering you to comply with the following provisions during the entire period of quarantine."" You set that to ominous music under a title calling them ""concentration camps,"" as some have done in YouTube videos, and it comes off as pretty scary. Here's the response from Iowa officials: ""To ensure there is no confusion on this issue, Iowa Department of Public Health wants to make it clear that Iowa has not issued any isolation and quarantine orders for novel influenza A (H1N1), and has no plans to issue any this fall. ""In preparation for public health emergencies, these types of templates are often prepared in case they are needed, but isolation and quarantine orders are only very rarely used in very specific situations."" The templates were prepared when H1N1 first reared up in Mexico, when it was feared to be much more deadly than it turned out to be, Quinlisk said. ""As soon as we realized it wasn't that bad, or at least that it was similar to the seasonal flu, that was the end of that,"" she said. There are a couple of other claims in the e-mail we received. One is that Massachusetts state officials are ""in the process of passing a law that will mandate vaccines for the swine flu."" According to the chain e-mail, the bill would allow "" 'authorities' to impose vaccinations. If you refuse, they can haul you away into quarantine. If you refuse that, you'll be fined up to $1,000 per day, and possibly be incarcerated in prison for 30 days."" On Oct. 8, the Massachusetts legislature did sign off on a bill to tighten the powers of public health officials to isolate or quarantine people to contain the outbreak of serious contagious diseases. But that doesn't translate to ""a law that will mandate vaccines for the swine flu."" In fact, said Jennifer Manley, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Department of Health, ""There will absolutely, positively not be any mandatory vaccines for the H1N1 virus in Massachusetts."" Most states have laws more than 100 years old that allow people who pose a public health danger to be isolated or quarantined, Quinlisk said. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many states looked into updating those laws to ensure, among other things, that people's civil rights are not violated. Some have clearly misinterpreted those efforts and assigned them insidious intent, she said. No states are considering quarantining people with H1N1. ""Quarantine is a public health tool that is primarily used to keep well people who have been potentially exposed to a serious illness away from others who may be susceptible,"" said Christine Pearson with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ""It's particularly effective when a new disease has not yet been introduced into our country. Given that the virus is already widespread in the United States and worldwide and is presenting the same sort of disease we see with regular seasonal flu, CDC does not intend to issue quarantine or isolation orders for 2009 H1N1 flu at this time."" The chain e-mail claims that the Iowa policy ""provides for a state round up of Iowa citizens who might be exposed to the swine flu virus."" The fact is that there is no mandatory order that all Iowa residents be vaccinated against H1N1, let alone a policy seeking to round up and detain people those refuse. We rule this claim ."
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8798
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UK parliament backs human-animal embryo research.
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Britain’s parliament voted on Monday to allow the creation of human-animal embryos which some scientists say are vital to research cures for diseases but critics argue pervert the course of nature.
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true
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Science News
|
An early-stage cloned embryo called a blastocysts is pictured in this undated handout photo. In a separate vote, parliament also decided to allow parents of children suffering serious diseases to use in-vitro fertilisation to select “savior siblings” who can act as donors for transplants to save their sick brothers and sisters. Parliament defeated an amendment to ban inter-species research — in which human DNA is injected into cells derived from animals — by 336 to 176 after hours of impassioned debate on ethics versus science. The vote means Britain retains its status as a world leader in stem cell research. Human-animal embryo research is banned in some countries including Australia, France, Germany and Italy. Prime Minister Gordon Brown supports the creation of human-animal or “admixed” embryos but some Roman Catholic members of his government oppose the research. Brown allowed members of parliament to vote by conscience rather than on party lines. “If we want to sustain stem cell research and bring new cures and treatments to millions of people, I believe admixed embryos are necessary,” Brown argued in a newspaper article. The human fertilisation and embryology bill prohibits the transfer of the embryos to a human or animal and says they cannot be used for research beyond 14 days. The bill, which updates 1990 laws, is at committee stage when amendments are tabled and will be subject to a final vote in coming weeks. Two groups of scientists have already been given permission to create human-animal admixed embryos. The bill legalizes their research within set guidelines. Some researchers say allowing admixed embryos would open more avenues as they seek cures for conditions like motor neuron disease or Parkinson’s. They say their creation would help ease a deficit of donated human eggs for stem cell research. But other scientists and religious leaders say that creating human-animal embryos is unethical, and using them for research is a blind alley that won’t cure disease. One Catholic cardinal called the research “Frankenstein science”. David King, director of the campaign group Human Genetics Alert, said he feared sufferers of Alzheimer’s and other diseases were being offered false hope. “It is very sad that all these patient groups have been hyped up to believe in this stuff. They are going to be very disappointed. It is very unfair,” he told reporters. Parliamentarians also defeated an amendment which would have banned the creation of “savior siblings” — babies born from embryos selected through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) because they are a tissue match for a sibling with a genetic condition. Supporters say this will help children who cannot find matching tissue donors, but critics worry about the impact on children who have been born to improve a sibling’s health, particularly if the treatment fails. The embryology debate will continue on Tuesday when members of parliament will vote on moves to end the need for IVF clinics to consider a child’s need for a father. This would ease restrictions on lesbian couples and single women but opponents argue that a child needs a father. Parliament will also vote on Tuesday on abortion laws. Some MPs are seeking to lower the 24-week time limit for abortions. Brown favors the status quo.
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5060
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NOT REAL NEWS: Reports of Ebola cases in Texas unfounded.
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Texas health officials said Tuesday there are no “suspected or confirmed cases” of Ebola in the state as social media posts have falsely suggested in the wake of immigrants arriving from Africa, including Congo, where an outbreak in has surpassed 2,000 cases.
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true
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Health, Media, General News, Social media, Immigration, Not Real News, Africa, Texas, AP Fact Check
|
The false claims, ranging from there is an Ebola “outbreak” in Texas to reports of a few confirmed cases, have been circulating since April. The erroneous claims are also spreading at a time when Border Patrol officials said last week there has been a “dramatic” rise in the number of migrants arriving at the Texas border from African countries, although they remain a small fraction of the total number of migrants apprehended. “We do not have any suspected or confirmed cases of Ebola right now in Texas,” said Lara Anton, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also unaware of any Ebola cases nationwide, spokesman Benjamin Haynes said. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is also adding his voice. On Monday, the Republican governor tweeted that the state was working on “health security” He also linked to an April news story that debunked Ebola rumors in the border city of Laredo. He later responded to a pair of tweets surrounding Ebola fears in Texas, referring them to his earlier post. “In addition to border security, my office is working on Health Security. The Dept. of State Health Services is monitoring immigration sites to protect against infectious disease. In the meantime, Congress must secure the border & prevent a health threat,” Abbott tweeted . Border Patrol officials say more than 500 migrants from Africa have come through the Del Rio sector since May 30, a small fraction of the more than 33,000 total apprehensions that the sector has reported so far this year. Officials say the families from Africa are not just from the Democratic Republic of Congo — where the Ebola outbreak has taken hold — but also the Republic of Congo and Angola. Last week, San Antonio officials put out a call for French-speaking volunteers to help with the expected arrival of Congolese immigrants. An Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo has killed more than 1,300 people since August and is the second-deadliest in history. ___ This is part of The Associated Press’ ongoing effort to fact-check misinformation that is shared widely online, including work with Facebook to identify and reduce the circulation of false stories on the platform. ___ Find all AP Fact Checks here: https://www.apnews.com/tag/APFactCheck ___ Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck
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2407
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Donors pitch in to pay for surgery for extremely obese Texas girl.
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Nearly 1,500 donors have pledged more than $62,000 to help pay for surgery for a 12-year-old Texas girl diagnosed as morbidly obese due to a brain disease that is causing her to gain about two pounds a week.
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true
|
Health News
|
Alexis Shapiro suffered damage to her pituitary gland, which helps regulate weight, as a result of the brain disease. She has gained about 140 pounds (63.5 kgs) in less than two years because of the problem, her mother said. Her extreme excess of body fat is clinically defined as morbid obesity. “It has been heartbreaking for her and for us. She cannot do the things she used to love,” Jennifer Shapiro, her mother, said on the fundraising site GoFundMe. The mother said she is seeking about $50,000 for life-saving surgery to reduce the size of her daughter’s stomach because the family’s insurance company will not pay for the procedure unless the patient is at least 18 or has achieved full bone growth. Dr. Thomas Inge, a specialist in pediatric obesity at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, told NBC News that Alexis could receive the surgery at the hospital where he works within six weeks now that the funding appears to be in place. “Alexis will be seen this week in Cincinnati, and the preparations for surgery will be made at that time,” Inge told Reuters by email.
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10164
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Easing Labor Pain May Help Reduce Postpartum Depression in Some Women,Early Research Suggests
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A news release from the American Society of Anesthesiologists highlights the results of a preliminary study on the effect epidurals might have on post-partum depression. According to the release, “some” of 201 women who choose epidural pain relief during the birth of their child saw a decreased risk of developing postpartum depression, or PPD. Specifically, those who scored lower on a pain improvement scale showed a lower likelihood of developing PPD. The release notes two risk factors were accounted for in detecting this association — depression and tissue trauma caused by birth — and indirectly hedges on how something else may be responsible for the perceived effect However, that’s where the utility of this release ends and its problems begin. How many women saw a benefit? What about the strength of the effect? Were all of the biggest confounding factors accounted for, like social support and economic status? Why weren’t women who chose natural births not used as controls? And is natural birth really so risky and traumatic, as this release implies? Those are just a few of the important questions that this release (and even the not-yet peer-reviewed study it’s based on) fail to answer or simply address. The tone of the news release and the abstract (both by the American Society of Anesthesiologists) suggests that epidural anesthesia is helpful in preventing postpartum depression, but that assertion remains far from proven. A number of health journalists have picked up this news release and some provided important background details and caveats not found in the American Society of Anesthesiologists release. This article in Cosmopolitan magazine — despite an unfortunate subheadline touting “amazing superpowers” — is a good example. It acknowledges other research suggesting that “…it’s not just the degree of pain, but the amount of support a woman receives during childbirth that can influence whether she’s traumatized by the whole experience and develops depressive symptoms because of it.” PPD is a very common outcome of birth, affecting roughly one in seven mothers, according to the American Psychological Association. It’s more severe than the normal “baby blues,” caused by hormonal changes following birth, and rarely goes away on its own — it’s a serious disorder that can appear weeks or months after birth and often requires expert care to help resolve. If a simple and common medical intervention during birth can reduce the risk of PPD, it could benefit millions of women all over the world. That is, if the effect is shown to be causal and significant.
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false
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Association/Society news release
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The cost of a birth with an epidural isn’t mentioned. While it depends on the insurance carrier — some pass all or part of the costs of anesthesiology during birth onto consumers — the average epidural in the US adds about $1,200 to a birth bill, with some anesthesiologist practices charging more than $2,700 per epidural. There are no hard numbers in this release, and that’s a big shortcoming. Journalists and other readers are left imagining just how strong or weak this association is, and what percentage of women might benefit — or not. The best we get is “some women” of 201 who chose to receive an epidural are less likely to experience postpartum depression. To its credit, the release added some cautionary language regarding the study’s findings: “Although we found an association between women who experience less pain during labor and lower risk for postpartum depression, we do not know if effective pain control with epidural analgesia will assure avoidance of the condition,” said Dr. Lim. “Postpartum depression can develop from a number of things including hormonal changes, psychological adjustment to motherhood, social support, and a history of psychiatric disorders.” We’re not told about any of the risks of epidurals.Those risks include a drop in blood pressure (which can complicate an otherwise normal pregnancy), severe headache (in less than 1% of women), slowing of labor due to lying on one side for too long (unless a “walking” epidural is used, though the procedure is rare), shivering, backache, ringing of the ears, nausea, trouble urinating, and the increased likelihood of interventions like forceps and cesarean section (since it can be harder to push). Epidurals also require a catheter to drain urine, which significantly increase the risk of urinary tract infections. Correlation is not causation, and this release doesn’t go far enough to explain this. The release quotes lead researcher Dr. Grace Lim, who is the director of obstetric anesthesiology at Magee Women’s Hospital of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, as saying “We found that certain women who experience good pain relief from epidural analgesia are less likely to exhibit depressive symptoms in the postpartum period.” However, it also stands to reason that some women — whether or not they have an epidural or go on to develop post-partum depression — simply experience less pain. The release does include a brief caveat regarding the association between epidurals and post-partum depression: “…we do not know if effective pain control with epidural analgesia will assure avoidance of the condition.” And, helpfully, it calls the research “early” and “preliminary.” The release states the study controlled for two major confounding factors: “pre-existing depression and anxiety” and “post-delivery pain caused by tissue trauma during childbirth.” But that does not mean women who gave birth weren’t already at risk — i.e. they may not have been diagnosed. Also, we aren’t told whether the study accounted for other risk factors known to play significant roles in leading to postpartum depression, including: availability of family and social support; employment status and financial well-being; the mother’s physical health; infant behavior (e.g. colic); whether a pregnancy was planned; and other sources of acute stress. The release mentioned some of these in a quote from a study leader but, again, we aren’t told if the study actually controlled for these conditions. We found the statement that labor pain “may be psychologically harmful for some women and play a significant role in the development of postpartum depression” a gratuitous assessment, especially given that humans have been bearing children for hundreds of thousands of years without modern analgesics. This statement might scare women away from a perfectly viable alternative, i.e. birth without medicated pain relief. The release doesn’t mention who funded the study. The best comparison we get to alternatives is a bit of minor scaremongering. This release really should have brought more to bear on births where women choose to not to use an anesthetic, also called “natural” birthing. It should also be noted that nitrous oxide is increasingly being offered as an alternative in hospitals around the US. That’s worth noting. Epidurals are so widely available we don’t think the availability needs to be stated. While technically a novel result, it’s a minor one. We found a 2014 study in Anesthesia & Analgesia that explored the same question, though in a Chinese population and with greater rigor. That study compared women who chose epidurals to those who chose a “natural” birth without epidurals. Interestingly, we found a 2015 commentary that responds to this 2014 study — and it was authored by Lim (the lead author of the new study), who rightfully states that, if epidurals do decrease the risk for postpartum depression, then “it could have tremendous ramifications on the long-term mental well-being of half of the world’s population who are of child-bearing age.” Lim’s letter also called for more research with larger sample sizes to try and replicate the results. But roughly one year later, Lim’s abstract explores the question with no overt controls and a similar sample size. Nothing jumped out at us here that wasn’t covered in our “disease mongering” criteria.
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2524
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Fitness after 65 is no one-size-fits-all endeavor.
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America’s ageing population is posing special challenges, fitness experts say, because it is difficult to design effective workout routines for people with such a wide range of abilities.
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true
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Health News
|
For one 70-year-old, the goal may be to run a marathon, for another it’s getting out of a chair. “If you are teaching 10-year-olds, it’s perfectly reasonable to do an activity that everybody would participate in,” said Dr. Wojtek Chodzko-Zajko, an expert on aging with the American College of Sports Medicine. But 20 80-year-olds could be as different as chalk and cheese.” Some baby boomer could be athletic, he explained, while others would be unable to get out of bed. There are now more Americans age 65 and older than at any other time in U.S. history, according to Census Bureau figures. Some 40 million people age 65 and over lived in the United States in 2010, accounting for 13 percent of the total population. The older population grew from 3 million in 1900 to 40 million in 2010. Older adults should be doing aerobic activity to help maintain body weight, strengthening exercises to develop and maintain muscle mass and some type of flexibility training, according to Dr. James Graves, Dean of the College of Health at the University of Utah. Physical activity can reduce the risk of diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and osteoporosis, he said, as well as improve the quality of life by maintaining functional capacity, such as the ability to climb stairs, open doors, and carry groceries. “A very healthy 70-year-old can safely participate in high-intensity activity while a frail 60-year-old needs to lower the intensity,” said Graves. “My recommendation is to work with a personal trainer or group leader who has knowledge and qualifications to work with the elderly.” Mary Ann Wilson is the creator and host of the “Sit and Be Fit,” a senior fitness program that has aired on U.S. public television since 1987. The majority of her viewers are women over 65. For that population, she said, the goal of exercise is health and well-being, not physical prowess. “Gravity has been working on them for 70 years,” said Wilson, a registered nurse who specialized in geriatrics. “Gravity is not our friend after many years of pulling our heads, shoulders and upper torsos forward and down.” The 30-minute class includes warm-up, circulation and strength segments, a finger segment (for stiffness), standing for balance, and final relaxation. Posture, breathing, balance, cognitive functioning and reaction time are among the most important—and neglected—components of elder fitness, she said. “Focusing on gait is really important because as we age our gait changes,” said Wilson. Karen Peterson, author of “Move with Balance: Healthy Aging Activities for Brain and Body,” stresses a mind-body approach in workouts with seniors. “In our society it seems people don’t really like to do things unless they’re good at it already,” said Peterson, a kinesiologist based in Maui. “But what the brain likes is to be challenged.” Her exercises include tossing a bean bag to improve reaction time, walking a figure-eight pattern for balance, as well as eye stretches, jaw relaxers, childhood games and cognitive challenges to keep body and mind alert. “We take balance exercises and add conversation or math problems,” she said. “The concept is to always progress, always get more challenging.” To tackle the isolation and diversity of the older population, Peterson initiated a mentoring program in which the fitter seniors work with the frailer. “Some partners will become friends,” she said. “They’ll get really turned on.” Experts agree that it’s never too late to do something. “Exercise is effective even in the most frail individual,” Wilson said. “If they can wiggle their toes, they can exercise.”
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2684
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Caesarean births hit record high in 2007.
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Nearly 1.4 million babies born in the United States in 2007 were delivered by Caesarean section, a record U.S. high and a larger number than in most other industrialized nations, health officials said on Tuesday.
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true
|
Health News
|
In 2007, nearly one-third of all births were Caesarean deliveries, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report, noting large rises in all racial, ethnic and age groups over 10 years. The benefits and risks of Caesarean delivery, which involves major abdominal surgery, have been the subject of intense debate for more than a quarter of a century. In addition to health and safety risks for mothers and infants, hospital charges for a Caesarean delivery are almost double those for a vaginal delivery, according to the CDC. Caesarean delivery was the most frequently performed surgery in the United States in 2006, it said. After a drop in the early 1990s, the Caesarean rate rose from 21 percent of all births in 1996 to an all-time high of 32 percent in 2007, the report said. The number of Caesarean births rose 71 percent from 797,119 in 1996 to 1.367 million in 2007, it said. There was a big jump among women under the age of 25 beginning around 2000. Some of the increase may be related to a rise in multiple births and other non-medical factors such as older mothers, the mother’s choice and the doctor’s practice, the CDC said. Caesarean births rose in all states and the District of Columbia but the rates varied widely. Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Nevada, Rhode Island and Washington had increases of more than 70 percent.
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27921
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A video shows dolphins creating and playing with bubble rings.
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In jest, Marten said that the capabilities of dolphins to perform “hydrodynamic tricks” could qualify them to be “professors of fluid mechanics at a university.”
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true
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animals, dolphins
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Since at least 2006, a video clip has been making the rounds showing dolphins creating and playing with bubble rings. The video was published just one year after YouTube was created. Before the prominence of social media, it was shared by email: The attached video is of dolphins playing with silver colored rings which they have the ability to make under water to play with. It isn’t known how they learn this, or if it’s an inbred ability. The dolphin does a quick flip of its head and a silver ring appears in front of its pointed beak. The ring is a solid, donut shaped bubble about 2-ft across, yet it doesn’t rise to the surface of the water. The dolphin then pulls a small silver donut from the larger one. Looking at the twisting ring for one last time a bite is taken from it, causing the small ring to collapse into a thousands of tiny bubbles which head upward towards the water’s surface. After a few moments the dolphin creates another ring to play with. There also seems to be a separate mechanism for producing small rings, which a dolphin can accomplish by a quick flip of its head. An explanation of how dolphins make these silver rings is that they are “air-core vortex rings”. Invisible, spinning vortices in the water are generated from the tip of a dolphin’s dorsal fin when it is moving rapidly and turning. When dolphins break the line, the ends are drawn together into a closed ring. The higher velocity fluid around the core of the vortex is at a lower pressure than the fluid circulating farther away. Air is injected into the rings via bubbles released from the dolphin’s blowhole. The energy of the water vortex is enough to keep the bubbles from rising for a reasonably few seconds of play time. We don’t know the specific origins of this video clip, but bottlenose dolphins’ producing and manipulating bubble rings is indeed a real phenomenon that has been observed and described by researchers, as noted in the 2000 article “Bubble Ring Play of Bottlenose Dolphins: Implications for Cognition,” published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology: Ongoing research into the cognitive capabilities of dolphins and other cetaceans has captured the interest and imagination of both the scientific community and the public. Bottlenose dolphins are gregarious mammals that show a strong propensity for play behavior with physical objects and with [each other]. There have been previous reports that both captive and wild dolphins produce their own objects of play, termed “bubble rings”. During these events, dolphins expel air from their blowhole, and the expelled air rises to the surface in a torus or ringlike form. Air-breathing dolphins always produce bubbles when they expel air underwater. Besides bubble rings, dolphins also produce a wide variety of other bubble types. They occasionally emit bubble streams concurrent with vocal activity. When surprised, curious, or excited, dolphins often emit a rapid exhalation termed a “bubble burst”. Breathing in dolphins, unlike in other mammals, is solely under voluntary control, a crucial feature in their adaptation to a fully aquatic existence. Whereas the physics of ring formation is straightforward, the actual production of stable rings may require some practice, expertise, and forethought by the dolphins. Dolphins in different oceanariums have been reported to produce bubble rings. For example, dolphins would swim to the bottom of the pool, stop, assume a horizontal position, and then with a sharp upward jerk of the head, expel a ring of air through their blowhole. Dolphins frequently manipulate their bubble rings by generating vortices around the objects, which cause the bubble rings to turn vertically by 90° or flip in orientation 180°. Bubble play can result in a sequence of two bubble rings, such that the second bubble ring joins the first bubble ring to form a large bubble ring, which is often then further manipulated. Sometimes a third smaller bubble ring extrudes from the larger ring as a result of the force of impact between the first and second bubble rings. This third bubble ring is frequently manipulated by the dolphins in a similar manner as described above for single rings where the dolphins vertically turn the bubble ring or completely flip the ring. A 1996 episode of “Noorderlicht” featured Dr. Ken Marten explaining the bubble rings and the intelligence of dolphins. The TV show was a Dutch scientific documentary series. The bubble rings moments begin at 3:59 in the video:
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30118
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Despite repeatedly claiming that the Yellowstone caldera does not pose a super-eruption risk in our lifetimes, NASA has admitted the threat is real and is working to geoengineer a solution to negate that risk.
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“The good news is that it does seem possible to achieve [such a risk reduction solution] on a timescale that is short compared to the average time between eruptions of a given supervolcano,” Wilcox told us. “The bad news is that humans would have to make a concerted effort for thousands of years to defang a volcano like Yellowstone, and it would have essentially no effect if the eruption were going to happen anyway within a few human lifetimes.”
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false
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Science, nasa, yellowstone
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In the realm of of science-based clickbait, no topic is more reliable for delivering page views and social media shares than claims that the pool of magma sitting below Yellowstone National Park is about to erupt in a humanity-ending cataclysm. As we have repeatedly, exhaustingly, and redundantly reported, the likelihood of that mega-disaster’s occurring in the next couple of thousand years is extremely low, and the region is monitored continuously for threatening activity which would provide ample warning if that situation were to change for some currently unknown reason. A perfect example of the pervasiveness of this claim (and, perhaps, the futility of fact-checking it), comes from the apocalypse-oriented website Breaking Israel News. Over the course of a few sentences, that website strung together multiple previously debunked Yellowstone claims into a meta-claim in need of a fresh debunking: After initially denying that the unusual amount of seismic activity witnessed last year was an indication of imminent danger, NASA scientists are proposing a solution that could save half the world while admitting that their intervention could initiate the explosion it was intended to prevent. Last year, increased seismic activity at Yellowstone generated a great deal of concern. More than 2,300 tremors were recorded between June and September, one of the largest earthquake swarms ever recorded at the site. Though geologists assured the public that the activity was normal for the site, another series of quakes and unusual eruptions beginning in February, increased fears that the supervolcano was waking up. An investigation revealed magma filling up in the underneath chamber of the supervolcano. In July, a massive, 100 ft.-wide fissure opened up in the Grand Teton National Park near Yellowstone, further increasing fears. While Breaking Israel News didn’t actually mention a year in their story, the “2,300 tremors recorded between June and September” referred to a series of minor earthquakes breathlessly reported by the Daily Mail and other junk news purveyors back in 2017 as a sign of a coming cataclysm. As we noted in our debunking of those claims, thousands of detectable earthquakes occur in the Yellowstone region in any given year, and they in no way portend an imminent supereruption. The reference to a “100 ft.-wide fissure open[ing] up” in nearby Grand Teton National park, as we reported in July 2018, refers to an unrelated crack in a cliff face which rangers feared could result in a large chunk of rock’s crushing climbers and onlookers below, not a coming eruption. This newer iteration of a Yellowstone claim introduced viral fear by asserting that a NASA study published in 2015 (which received attention in a 2017 BBC Futures article) somehow proved NASA was not being honest about geologic events that post-dated their report. That BBC Future article, which Breaking Israel News and other sources cite extensively but without context, presented commentary from an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Brian Wilcox, who served on a NASA Advisory Council on Planetary Defense. That body did conclude in 2015 that a risk of a supervolcano was more likely than a large scale comet or asteroid impact, and they gamed out a variety of extremely theoretical and long-term solutions to mitigate such a risk: Supervolcanic eruptions occur more frequently than large asteroid or comet impacts that would have a similarly catastrophic effect to human civilization, especially now that many asteroid orbits have been mapped. We assess whether future supervolcanic eruptions could be dampened, delayed, or prevented by engineering solutions. That brainstorming did not mean, however, that Wilcox or the other researchers concluded that a supereruption was more likely to occur in our lifetimes than previously thought, or that an urgent need existed to begin geoengineering solutions for it. Via email, Wilcox told us that “Neither I nor, to my knowledge, any of the co-authors has commented on the seismic activity or possible danger of a near-term eruption.” He referred to the geoengineering plans as a thought experiment revolving around the question “is it possible for human civilization to prevent supervolcano eruptions that might threaten humanity?” As described by BBC Future, the solution they proposed involved utilizing the heat from the magma for geothermal energy by drilling toward the hot earth and running water through the holes. This would have two benefits, the study argued: First, in the short term, it would provide a possible source of geothermal energy; and second, in the long term, it could (over thousands of years) reduce the overall risk of a caldera-level eruption: They believe the most viable solution could be to drill up to 10km down into the supervolcano, and pump down water at high pressure. The circulating water would return at a temperature of around 662F, thus slowly day by day extracting heat from the volcano … “Yellowstone currently leaks around 6GW in heat,” Wilcox says. “Through drilling in this way, it could be used to create a geothermal plant, which generates electric power at extremely competitive prices of around $0.10/kWh. You would have to give the geothermal companies incentives to drill somewhat deeper and use hotter water than they usually would, but you would pay back your initial investment, and get electricity which can power the surrounding area for a period of potentially tens of thousands of years. And the long-term benefit is that you prevent a future supervolcano eruption which would devastate humanity.” When Wilcox said “long-term,” he was not talking about years or decades. In the study, the team made it clear they were speaking in terms of tens of thousands of years: The cooling perimeter would close-in on the magma chamber at the rate of approx. 1 m/year. Even for a massive supervolcano such as Yellowstone, it would take less than 50,000 years for such a cooling system to completely drain the heat away from the magma chamber, all the while generating electricity at competitive prices. No plans are afoot to begin such a forward-looking initiative, and the report itself stated that any work in that regard right now would be premature. “There are a number of unknowns about the nature of supervolcanic eruptions and how they are supplied that need to be addressed before attempting any engineered solutions,” the reported concluded. Therefore, no immediate plans to geoengineer a risk-reduction solution to the Yellowstone caldera are at hand, nor is new evidence suggesting an increased risk of eruption.
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9707
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Coffee could literally be a lifesaver
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This CNN story describes yet another observational study of the possible links between coffee consumption and health, this one concluding that overall, whether decaf or regular, coffee drinking is linked to reduced risk of death from heart disease, diabetes, and neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease, although not cancer. The headline — “Coffee could literally be a lifesaver” — is overblown given the types of evidence we’re talking about. But the story otherwise does a worthy and responsible job of framing the study’s weaknesses and strengths, particularly so in explaining confounding factors and why so many coffee studies historically have yielded “murky” results. It also takes a pretty good stab at exploring the study’s suggestion that natural chemicals in the coffee may be responsible for the beverage’s potential health benefits, an effort that was essentially missing from a story in STAT that was otherwise much stronger in describing the strengths and weaknesses of this and all observational studies. The CNN story also aptly noted the novel analysis of coffee drinking in a non-smoking subset of the nearly 200,000 subjects. Overall, this CNN piece could have been made stronger by having outside experts comment on the findings, as the STAT piece did to excellent effect; by offering more qualitative details about the sources of the data; by noting that in excessive quantities, the new study identified a slight increase in risk of death; and — as the STAT piece did superbly, noting the likely “benefits” in terms of absolute risk (very, very small). Readers and viewers of mass media have been nearly whiplashed by claims and counterclaims related to the benefits and risks of coffee drinking. A few studies over the past several decades have concluded that, at least in large amounts, coffee can be “toxic,” but most of the coverage has focused on the drink’s possible health benefits, but in ways that led to substantial confusion. The new analysis, described in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, has some significant statistical assets not present in previous studies, including a subset analysis of non-smokers’ death risks. Its central finding — that coffee safely confers health benefits (essentially reduced death risks for some major categories of disease) even in relatively high doses among non-smokers — is likely to be reassuring to coffee addicts — and their physicians.
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mixture
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coffee,relative vs. absolute risk
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Arguably, most people know how much their java habit costs them every day, and neither this CNN story, nor the more detailed and “news you can use”-focused STAT story mentioned costs. Like hazelnut cream, some mention of the overall cost of the coffee habit in the U.S. would have added some flavor, but this omission gets a pass. CNN’s piece earns a ding for not mentioning the small risk of deaths overall in the whole study cohort among those who drank excessive amounts of coffee; and also one for not — as a STAT article did — noting the decreased death risk in absolute terms. We only learn of the benefits in relative terms, which can be misleading. The story does get some credit for noting the data on possible links of coffee drinking and suicide rates and why the data suggest that chemicals in the coffee itself may confer any benefits seen from coffee drinking. On balance, however, there wasn’t quite enough here to earn a “satisfactory” rating. As noted earlier, the CNN piece should and could have noted the slightly increased risk of death is those participants in the current study who drank very high amounts of coffee, something the STAT article covering the same research did mention to good effect and in context. The CNN story could have been much stronger and more credible if it had noted — as the STAT story did — that the data used in the new analysis came from three major, continuing, federally funded studies of nurses, physicians and other health professionals. Such information is not incidental, given that these large-scale epidemiological research projects have had their successes and failures, but mostly because health care professionals may have particular lifestyles and knowledge that the general population does not, differences that may have an impact on the findings. The story also stumbles when it says that “drinking coffee, whether regular or decaf, could reduce the risk of death.” Since this was an observational study incapable of proving cause and effect, this overstates the findings. The CNN story did a good job of qualifying the findings but these missteps, along with the absence of outside commentary, are significant weaknesses. None here. Not a one, and too bad, really, because such stories — of they are going to reduce or limit confusion — need expert sources for context and consumer guidance, something the STAT story gave readers tied up in red ribbon. We thought that a comparison of alternatives to coffee was beyond the scope of the story. Coffee is widely available, and that’s obvious from the story. The CNN story did a good job of pointing out what was new in this observational study and why it mattered. The STAT story noted how “clever” the researchers were in approaching the analysis of the non-smoking sub-set, which also emphasized the novelty of this study. There was a news release issued by the American Heart Association, which quoted both the doctoral candidate in the CNN story and the senior author. The CNN story appears to have been based at least in part on an interview with the former.
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953
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China vows to raise recycling rates of rural plastic mulch.
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China vowed to improve the recycling rates of plastic mulch used in farming, the government said on Wednesday, amid mounting concerns about soil contamination as unrecovered bits of the thin film get left behind, leaving traces in crops.
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true
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Environment
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Plastic mulch, basically thin sheeting placed over individual crops, is used throughout China’s arid and dusty north to improve growing conditions and boost yields by retaining moisture for crops and suppressing weeds. The country deploys about 200,000 square km (77,220 square miles) of plastic mulch, an area the size of Belarus. A notice published by several ministries on Wednesday said China would work to improve the recovery rate of plastic mulch to 80% next year and ensure there is “zero growth” in the amount of plastic mulch used. It will aim to bring recovery rates to 100% and start reducing total land coverage by 2025. The notice said China would also work to improve its monitoring capability and include mulch pollution in the performance indicators of local government officials. Manufacturers will also be put under pressure to improve product standards. China uses about 2 million to 3 million tonnes of plastic mulch every year, but waste treatment capacity amounts to just 180,000 tonnes, Yan Changrong, a researcher with the China Rural Science Institute, said at a recent forum. While the use of plastic film can boost yields significantly in the short term, unrecovered remnants eventually degrade the soil and can also contaminate crops, with Chinese exports of spinach and ginger found to contain traces of plastic, said Xu Jingeng, a parliamentary delegate for Shandong province, in a proposal submitted to the National People’s Congress in March. Handling large volumes of plastic waste has become one of China’s pressing challenges. The country’s recycling capacity stands at around 23 million to 25 million tonnes, only half of total annual plastic waste produced, according to data from the Beijing Chemistry University. The city of Shanghai is gradually restricting the use of single-use plastics in catering, and the island province of Hainan has already vowed to completely eliminate single-use plastic by 2025. [nL4N23Y1YE][nL3N20G7K1]
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14594
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Under Virginia law, if you are a non-federally licensed (gun) dealer, you cannot get a background check even if you want one.
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"McAuliffe says, ""Under Virginia law, if you are a non-federally licensed (gun) dealer, you cannot get a background check even if you want one."" The law requires only licensed dealers - those in the business of selling guns - to conduct background checks on a prospective buyer. As such, only licensed dealers are allowed to contact the state police to request the check. A private seller has no direct access to the background-check process. That doesn’t mean a private seller determined to get a background check is out in the cold. He can ask a gun dealer to conduct the check for him. But that’s a messy process that requires a lot of paperwork and the private seller to temporarily convey his gun to the dealer. So McAuliffe misspeaks when he says the law prohibits the private seller from getting a background check. But the law does make it very difficult for the private seller - who is under no obligation to seek a background check - to get one."
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false
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Guns, Virginia, Terry McAuliffe,
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"Gov. Terry McAuliffe says Virginia’s law requiring background checks on prospective gun buyers would be substantially broadened under a bipartisan agreement he’s struck with the General Assembly. Virginia now requires federally licensed dealers - those in the business of selling firearms - to conduct computerized checks to see whether a buyer has a disqualifying criminal record or mental health history. But casual sales between individuals are exempt and that, the governor says, opens a loophole for guns to fall into the wrong hands. McAuliffe, a Democrat, is backing legislation that would position state police at Virginia gun shows to conduct voluntary background checks on the private sales. ""Under Virginia law, if you are a non-federally licensed dealer, you cannot get a background check even if you want one,"" McAuliffe said during a Feb. 3 interview with Mike Valerio of WWBT-TV in Richmond. ""We changed that law."" McAuliffe made a similar claim during a Feb. 1 interview on WJLA-TV in Washington. ""Even if the non-licensed dealer today wants to do a background check, he is prohibited by law,"" he said. Those claims and others by the governor were disputed in a full-page ad taken out in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Feb. 9 by Everytown for Gun Safety, a national gun control group founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Everytown accuses McAuliffe, who promised in his 2013 campaign to seek background checks for all gun buyers, of backing weak reforms. The ad said ""voluntary background checks already exist"" for private sellers. So we decided to investigate whether the governor is right in saying that an unlicensed seller in Virginia - say, someone who wants to get rid of a rifle or a handgun he has at home - now is legally barred at a gun show from getting a background check on a potential buyer. Under state law, a person seeking to buy a firearm from a licensed dealer is required to fill out a form stating that he never has been convicted of a felony or adjudicated mentally incompetent and that he is not subject to a restraining order. The dealer forwards the information to the state police, which performs an ""instant background check"" and tells the dealer whether he can sell the gun to the customer. Virginia’s law allows only federally licensed dealers to contact the state police for the check. ""The private seller, they can’t even ask for a background check from the state police,"" Christina Nuckols, deputy press secretary for McAuliffe, told us on the phone. But that doesn’t mean a private seller is without recourse. He still can ask a licensed dealer to conduct a background check on the potential buyer but, if the dealer is willing, it becomes a complicated process. Under state law, licensed dealers can do background checks only for the purchase of firearms that are in their inventory. A private seller seeking a background check could convey his gun on consignment to a dealer, said Corinne Geller, public relations manager for the state police. That’s not an unusual occurrence, according to David Hathcock, manager of Bob Moates Sports Shop in Chesterfield County, a licensed dealer of firearms. ""Most people want to make sure their guns to wind up in good hands,"" he told us, adding ""At any given time, I have 50 to 100 guns on consignment"" in the store. Moates, however, only does business from his store. And McAuliffe, in his comments, was specifically referring to private sellers at gun shows being barred from getting a background check. We spoke to three Virginia dealers on Feb. 14 who had tables set up at The Nation’s Gun Show in Chantilly. They all told us the governor’s statement is wrong and they are occasionally approached by a private seller and a buyer seeking a check. The dealers said they’ll run the background check for a fee -- usually $25 to $35 -- to compensate for the trouble of putting the gun in their inventory and storing the information for a required 20 years. ""We do it all the time; it’s absolutely legal,"" said Brian Parrish, owner of Triune Shooting Sports in Warrenton. He told us he gets an average ""one or two"" such requests at every gun show. Sonny Condon, owner on Sonny’s Guns & Transfers in Richmond, said it’s rare when he gets such a request from a private seller, ""but it does happen."" Jerry Cochran, owner of Trader Jerry’s in Tazewell County, said he only recently became aware that he could run a background check for a private seller. ""I’ve done five of them in the last month,"" he said. McAuliffe’s measure would streamline the procedure by allowing a private seller to go straight to the state police at a gun show to request a background check. But, as before, neither the seller nor the buyer would be required legally to seek the check. McAuliffe warns that a private seller who bypasses the new system could face increased liability if a gun he sold was used in a crime. Philip Van Cleave, president of the pro-gun Virginia Citizens Defense League, said he thinks more private sellers will seek background checks if the legislation passes, ""but it’s not going to be earth-shaking."" The bill, we should note, sailed through the House of Delegates on a 96-3 vote on Feb. 10 and now is pending in the Senate. Our ruling McAuliffe says, ""Under Virginia law, if you are a non-federally licensed (gun) dealer, you cannot get a background check even if you want one."" The law requires only licensed dealers - those in the business of selling guns - to conduct background checks on a prospective buyer. As such, only licensed dealers are allowed to contact the state police to request the check. A private seller has no direct access to the background-check process. That doesn’t mean a private seller determined to get a background check is out in the cold. He can ask a gun dealer to conduct the check for him. But that’s a messy process that requires a lot of paperwork and the private seller to temporarily convey his gun to the dealer. So McAuliffe misspeaks when he says the law prohibits the private seller from getting a background check. But the law does make it very difficult for the private seller - who is under no obligation to seek a background check - to get one."
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8290
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Protective gear, cellphone, video chats: How America's clergy minister to COVID-19 patients.
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Reverend Manuel Dorantes closed his eyes, took a breath to calm his fear and prayed when word came that Cardinal Blase Joseph Cupich had put out a call for volunteers.
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true
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Health News
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Cupich, archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, needed two dozen young priests to take on the sacred duty of administering the last rites to those dying from the new and highly contagious coronavirus. For the priests, like doctors, nurses and other frontline workers, it means putting their lives at risk to care for the sick in hospitals. “I know the consequences,” said Dorantes, 36. “We are called to do this.” Throughout history, priests and other clergy have risked their lives ministering to the dying through population-decimating plagues and on the battlefields of wars. But in the face of COVID-19, which has killed more than 150,000 people worldwide and about 33,000 in the United States, the Vatican last month waived the requirement for in-person worship and sacraments, including a special dispensation for believers who cannot receive the last rites. Many faiths and denominations in America have taken similar unprecedented actions, as the coronavirus has upended one of the most sacred duties of clergy of most major faiths - ministering to the dying and comforting the bereaved. The disease has forced clergy to rely on technology. Cell phones or iPads are held at the bedsides of very ill patients by nurses and orderlies. During funerals, they preach to empty pews during services shared using sites such as Zoom and FaceTime. Graveside prayers can be attended by the barest few, sometimes just three mourners. For clergy, this is the new normal, said United Methodist Bishop Thomas Bickerton, a member of the denomination’s ruling council of bishops, which has halted in-person worship services. Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner, head rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in Closter, New Jersey, said many hospitals won’t allow bedside visits by anyone, including clergy. “We don’t even bother to ask,” said Kirshner, 46, who leads a conservative congregation of about 800 families. “It’s too dangerous.” But the rabbi asks nurses or orderlies to hold an iPad so patients can see it. They then pray together. “It’s very, very important that we at least offer that.” Some burials that under Jewish tradition should be held within a day have to wait a week or more, the rabbi said, in places where cemeteries and funeral homes are beyond capacity. One Muslim imam said many funeral homes in the United States are no longer allowing the Islamic ritual of washing the body before burial, for fear of spreading the disease. “For the family it’s tough because they cannot mourn the same,” Daoud Nassimi, an imam in Washington D.C., told the online publication Middle East Eye. About 3 million Americans identify as members of the Episcopalian Church, which is largely relying on video chats and phone calls by priests to make that last connection with those on the brink of death, according to Reverend Lorenzo Librija of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. A few weeks ago, he came up with a plan to organize the effort. It is called “Dial-a-Priest” and is aimed at helping people who do not have a relationship with a local church, but still want to receive the last rites. “We picked that name because it’s easy to remember and easy to Google,” said Librija. His group has about 100 retired ministers who have volunteered to man telephones around the clock, ready to give the ritual ministration of death from the Book of Common Prayer. The Archdiocese of Chicago, with its 24-member last rites team, is one of the few places in the nation where in-person visits to patients near death have continued in hospitals. Dorantes, pastor of Chicago’s Saint Mary of the Lake parish, said he has conducted several bedside rituals since he volunteered in late March. He and the other priests don protective jump suits and N95 respirator masks. Wearing gloves, they take a dab of blessed oil and make the sign of the cross on the patient’s forehead and hands using a Q-tip. “Laying on of hands and anointing, this is the sacrament of the church, a visible sign of invisible grace,” he said. “I could see it in their eyes, incredible moments of grace.”
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40136
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The forwarded email appears to be an article featuring the findings of microbiologist Anne LaGrange Loving who found that two-thirds of the lemons tested from 21 restaurants were contaminated with bacteria when added as slices to beverages.
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Contaminated Lemon Slices in Restaurants
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true
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Food / Drink
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This study was published in December, 2007 in the Journal of Environmental Health. It was co-authored by Anne LaGrange Loving and John Perz. The authors collected 76 lemon slices from 21 restaurants on 43 visits in Patterson, New Jersey. They swabbed both the lemon slice and the glass on which the slice had been placed and immediately after the glass had been brought to them. The result was that they found contamination on both the flesh and the rind of most of the lemon wedges, although they did not research how it got there. Some of it could have arrived with the fruit from the field, some of it could have been through contamination from the hands of employees. Some of it could have been from contaminated work surfaces. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration conducted a study in 2004 of both fast food and full service restaurants. The conclusion was that there was poor personal hygiene on the part of employees at 31 percent of the fast food restaurants and more than 41 percent of the full service restaurants. Comments
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42058
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Demands Welfare For 1,000,000 Illegals In Exchange For Wall
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A false claim circulating online states that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — in exchange for a border wall — “demands welfare” for immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. That story originated on a self-described satire site before spreading elsewhere online without any disclaimer.
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false
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border wall, Illegal immigration,
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A false claim circulating online states that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — in exchange for a border wall — “demands welfare” for immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. That story originated on a self-described satire site before spreading elsewhere online without any disclaimer.Following the longest government shutdown in American history, a bipartisan House-Senate panel is working to secure an agreement before another funding lapse is triggered on Feb. 15. Meanwhile, a false story circulating online claims that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has offered President Donald Trump a deal: “$2.7 billion for his wall if he grants amnesty to 1,000,000 impoverished undocumented immigrants and gives them access to food stamps and other benefits.” This story originated on America’s Last Line of Defense, a self-proclaimed satirical website, but it has since spread to other platforms. America’s Last Line of Defense is listed in our misinformation directory precisely because of how frequently its stories have misled readers in the past. In this case, the story has been reposted by Top Topic without a satire label, and shared on Facebook by a Tiffany Trump fan page, whose followers may not recognize that the story was intended as a joke.Regardless of its intent, the Last Line of Defense story perpetuates the false narrative that immigrants living in the U.S. illegally receive food stamps and other benefits. As we noted in a recent article, U.S. law already prohibits such immigrants from receiving most federal benefits. There are some exceptions, such as emergency medical care; short-term, non-cash emergency disaster relief; limited housing or community development assistance to those who were already receiving it in 1996; public health assistance for communicable diseases; and programs such as soup kitchens.The story also contains a number of falsehoods about the congresswoman. Ocasio-Cortez is not on the conference committee tasked with reaching a deal, and she was born in the Bronx, New York, not “illegally brought … across the border [by her parents] when she was a baby,” as the story states. We have been debunking false claims about immigrants living in the country illegally for years. And, since her election, Ocasio-Cortez has been the subject of online misinformation. Stories such as this one contribute to the misinformation about both. Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on the social media network.“About Us.” America’s Last Line of Defense. Accessed 7 Feb 2019.“Federal Funding Gaps: A Brief Overview.” Congressional Research Service. Updated 4 Feb 2019.Mattingly, Phil. “These members of Congress are seeking a deal on border security and Trump’s wall.” CNN. 28 Jan 2019.Schallhorn, Kaitlyn. “Who is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? 5 things to know about the New York congresswoman.” Fox News. 8 Jan 2019.
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10406
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Cholesterol-lowering drugs may treat swine flu
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This piece presents the results of a recent study that found that use of statins was associated with decreased mortality in people hospitalized with influenza. While the inclusion of several independent sources was a particular strength of this story, it could have been improved by making it clearer that this research is preliminary and has yet to undergo a formal review process to ensure their methods are sound and their calculations are accurate. A presentation of absolute risk reduction in mortality and a discussion of the limitations associated with observational studies would have also strengthened the piece.
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mixture
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"Statins are described as “cheap,” but actual figures are not provided. The price of statins varies considerably and some are not cheap. The piece states that statins reduced the rate of deaths by half compared to those not taking statins; however, it would have been more useful to the reader had the results been presented in terms of absolute risk reduction. (See our primer on absolute vs. relative risks.) The story doesn’t give the details behind a physician’s comment that ""there are relatively few downsides to trying statins"" and that statins are “relatively safe."" For the reader, who may not know much or anything about statins, what does that mean? What are the downsides? And how often do they occur? Although uncommon, statins may cause muscle soreness/damage or elevated liver enzymes. In a shared decision-making environment, one would simply spell out the facts and let the reader/consumer/patient decide what ""relatively few"" and ""relatively safe"" means to them. While the story indicates that these data were presented at the Infectious Diseases Society of America conference, it does not explicitly state that the results have not been published in a medical journal. Unlike published articles, this study has not gone through a rigorous review process. Furthermore, this study is observational, rather than experimental, and we cannot be sure if those who are taking statins are not different is some way than those who were not taking them and whether this could also account for the differences in survival between the groups. The story could have made at least brief mention of these limitations. This story does not engage in disease-mongering. This story includes commentary from several experts, including those not involved with the new study. The writer also points out that the CDC sponsored the study. The story discusses other flu treatments, specifically Tamiflu and the experimental drug, peramivir, so we’ll give it a satisfactory grade on this criterion. But it could have mentioned other treatments in the hospital that also affect mortality, including type of ventilation, antibiotics for secondary infection and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. This story makes it clear that statins are widely available. The story clearly indicates that this is the first large-scale study to evaluate the role of statins in increasing survival associated with the flu. The story also mentions previous research, which found that statins can improve survival from other infectious diseases. The story does not appear to rely on a press release."
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23456
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Since being elected, (Tom Barrett) has dumped 8.2 billion gallons of raw sewage into Lake Michigan.
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Scott Walker blames Tom Barrett for dumping sewage into Lake Michigan
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false
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Environment, Wisconsin, Scott Walker,
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"Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker is raising a stink over sewage. It’s a tempting target, especially when torrential rains July 22 and July 23 forced the dumping of untreated sewage into Lake Michigan and thousands of homes were hit with flooded basements. Walker, a Republican candidate for governor, is blaming his opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a Democrat, for dumping the sewage -- not only for the July overflows, but for releases going back to 2004, when Barrett was first elected. On at least two occasions, Walker campaign manager Keith Gilkes blamed Barrett for the recent mess and previous overflows. On Aug. 5, Gilkes made the charge during a visit to the city by Lisa Jackson, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. On Aug. 11, he made the same charge after local communities complained about a large water rate increase being proposed by Barrett’s Milwaukee Water Works. With summer winding down, it’s a topic fresh in many people’s minds: torrents of water running through streets, the giant sinkhole on E. North Ave. that swallowed a Cadillac Escalade and the mounds of water-soaked junk carted from homes in the aftermath. Five to eight inches of rain fell July 22 and July 23, according to the National Weather Service. Officially, 5.61 inches fell at Mitchell International Airport, the second highest daily rainfall on record for Milwaukee. With so much rain, Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District reported it couldn’t treat 2.1 billion gallons of sewage and storm water, which ended up going in the lake. MMSD has done that every year, to varying degrees depending on the weather: When the deep tunnels run out of room and the sewage treatment plants on Jones Island and South Shore can’t keep up, the district shuts off access to the tunnels and sends untreated sewage into the lake. The overflows present environmental problems for the lake, but without them, sewage is more apt to back up into people’s basements. By law, the district is required to report the releases to the state Department of Natural Resources. Going back to when Barrett was first elected mayor, and highlighting a campaign promise made in 2004, the Walker campaign said the sewage dumps are Barrett’s fault. ""Since being elected, he has dumped 8.2 billion gallons of raw sewage into Lake Michigan,"" Gilkes said. That’s a lot of flushing, so we decided to look into the claims. First the number. The Walker organization used media reports from the overflows going back to 2004 and tallied up what went untreated. We found Walker low-balled it. Had his campaign staff checked with MMSD - the totals are on the district’s website -- his people would have found that overflows actually totaled 10.4 billion gallons since 2004. Walker undershot the mark by 21percent. Walker spokeswoman Jill Bader said her staff assumed news reports, including figures from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stories, were comprehensive. But by using different news accounts from different sources to tally up the figures, their number was off. For instance, in 2007, the Walker campaign didn’t use news reports from the Journal Sentinel at all, and in so doing missed nearly 400 million gallons of overflows. After being contacted by PolitiFact Wisconsin, she said the campaign staff had recently come across the district’s higher figures. Now, the discharges themselves. Is it raw sewage? That term sounds like it’s all coming from toilets. Actually, an estimated 95 percent is rainwater and runoff. Still, it’s untreated and therefore can be considered ""raw."" Finally, what about Barrett’s role in all of this? In a literal sense, he doesn’t have a hand in it. The city doesn’t operate Jones Island or the South Shore plant. The July decision to shut the gates to the deep tunnel system and start overflows was made by Kevin Shafer, MMSD’s executive director, in concert with his staff and Veolia Water North America, which operates the district’s waste water treatment system. Shafer said he made his first decision at about 6 p.m. on July 22 for the combined sewer system covering portions of Milwaukee and Shorewood and again at 1 a.m. the next day for the separated sewer system. It’s the same procedure for all overflows. ""There is no contact with elected officials,"" Shafer said. ""It’s purely an operational/technical decision that I make."" But Barrett bears some responsibility. During his first campaign for mayor in 2004, Barrett was highly critical of MMSD and he vowed to fix the problem by demanding that the agency stop dumping raw sewage. ""The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District must clean up its act,"" Barrett said during the campaign. A Barrett radio ad lamented that MMSD the previous summer had ""dumped 90,000 gallons of raw sewage into Lincoln Creek,"" which ultimately flows into the lake, and cited this as an example of the ""outrageous failures of the district."" As mayor, Barrett controls seven out of the 11 members of the MMSD board. He has the ability through his appointments to influence policy and procedures. The district plans to spend $1 billion by the end of the year to create new capacity and make other improvements to reduce overflows under a 2002 court-approved agreement between the DNR and MMSD. The new 27th Street tunnel project added 27 million gallons of capacity. A 7.1 mile long tunnel on the northwest side added 89 millions gallons of capacity. The entire storage system can store 521 million gallons until MMSD can process it. That means to handle the 2.1 billion gallons of overflow from the July storm, MMSD would need a system that is about four times larger. On the 27th Street tunnel project, the district said it spent $3 for every gallon of capacity. So if that cost held true, the price tag for an expansion able to handle 2.1 billion gallons would be about $6 billion. James Fratrick, a watershed specialist for the DNR, said that MMSD will never completely stop untreated waste from being released into Lake Michigan, and its state permit allows some emergency dumping to occur because zero discharge is not practical or required under federal law. ""With rainfall events like this, it’s not economically feasible,"" Fratrick said. So there is some truth to Walker’s statement in that Barrett pledged he would stop the flows during the campaign and can influence the policies and procedures through his appointments to the board. But it’s an exaggeration to say that Barrett himself dumped the raw sewage into the lake after the extraordinary rainfall."
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13188
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"Russ Feingold Says Donald Trump and Ron Johnson ""oppose a woman's right to choose and Johnson voted against the Violence Against Women Act."
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"Feingold says Trump and Johnson ""oppose a woman’s right to choose and Johnson voted against the Violence Against Women Act."" Trump and Johnson are anti-abortion, though Trump in particular has said he supports exceptions to allow abortion in certain cases. Johnson did vote no on reauthorizing the violence law, but it’s not as though he opposed protections for women; in fact, he voted for alternative measures that did not pass. For a statement that is accurate but needs clarification."
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true
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Abortion, Criminal Justice, Crime, Women, Wisconsin, Russ Feingold,
|
"The tight Wisconsin U.S. Senate race has been marked by attacks made on GOP incumbent Ron Johnson and Democratic challenger Russ Feingold. (We’ve highlighted 20 of them.) But ahead of the Nov. 8, 2016 election, Johnson and his fellow Republicans are also trying to tie Feingold to the unpopular Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. And Feingold and other Democrats are trying to hitch Johnson to the equally unpopular GOP nominee, Donald Trump. A Feingold radio ad released Oct. 26, 2016 makes a number of claims about Johnson and Trump on women’s issues, including saying they both ""oppose a woman's right to choose and Johnson voted against the Violence Against Women Act, denying protections to victims of domestic violence."" Let’s check both parts of the attack. Right to choose On abortion generally, Trump has been controversial. In Green Bay in March 2016, he said women should be punished for having an abortion. (Our In Context item fleshed out those remarks.) Then, hours later, Trump’s campaign posted a statement saying women are victims of abortion. When it comes more specifically to a woman’s right to choose, Trump went from pro-choice to anti-abortion, as our colleagues noted in rating True a claim by former GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina that Trump had ""changed his mind"" on abortion. As late as 2000, Trump wrote that he was pro-choice. But by 2011, he said he was anti-abortion, a position he has stated as recently as October 2016. Trump has said, including in his Green Bay remarks, that he supports exceptions for the life of the mother, incest and rape. Johnson is also anti-abortion. During his successful campaign to win Feingold’s seat in 2010, Johnson was asked if he Roe v. Wade was ""settled law."" He said the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion ""was a real tragedy,"" saying it ""usurped the democratic process."" In this race, Johnson was endorsed by Wisconsin Right to Life, which noted his support for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a 2015 bill that would have generally banned abortion at 20 weeks and later. And Life News has urged support for Johnson, saying he has a ""strong pro-life voting record."" Feingold’s campaign also pointed out that in 2011, Johnson co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, which declared ""that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being beginning at the moment of fertilization, cloning, and other moment at which an individual comes into being."" Johnson, however, has supported the three exceptions -- a position that drew some criticism from conservatives when he challenged Feingold in 2010. Violence Against Women Act The Violence Against Women Act was adopted in 1994. When it was reauthorized in 2005, it was set to expire in 2011. New reauthorization votes were taken in 2012 and 2013. In 2012, Johnson was among 31 Republican senators who voted no. The bill passed the Senate, but died in the House. In 2013, the bill passed the Senate again, with Johnson among 22 Senate Republicans to vote no. The measure then passed the House and was signed into law. Like the 1994 version, the renewed law makes it easier to prosecute crimes against women in federal court, and provides such services as domestic abuse hotlines and shelters for battered women. The new bill was also extended to women of Native American tribal lands who are attacked by non-tribal residents, as well as to immigrants, gays and lesbians. It’s worth noting why Johnson said he voted no. Johnson issued a statement after his 2012 vote, saying in part: I believe it’s critical to ensure that laws are in place to prevent and deter crime – against both women and men. Regrettably, the debate over the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act was completely politicized by the Senate Democratic leadership. Republicans offered very reasonable alternatives to extend the Violence Against Women Act. Senate Democrats today defeated proposals to provide U.S. marshals the tools they need to track sex offenders across state lines. They voted against legislation to establish an interstate database for DNA evidence, to ensure sex offenders are brought to justice regardless or the jurisdiction in which they commit their crimes. And they rejected legislation to provide additional funds to allow law enforcement to pursue justice for hundreds of thousands of women. Johnson also issued a statement following his 2013 vote, saying in part: In passing the Violence Against Women Act, the Democrat-controlled Senate turned the renewal of a non-controversial piece of legislation that had a history of strong bipartisan support into a divisive and highly partisan bill. As a result, the Senate has approved a piece of legislation that sounds nice, but which is fatally flawed. By including an unconstitutional expansion of tribal authority and introducing a bill before the Congressional Budget Office could review it to estimate its cost, Senate Democrats made it impossible for me to support a bill covering an issue I would like to address. Most analysts believe it would add more than $2 billion to the deficit. I voted for an alternative that did not have these serious flaws. That alternative would help deter and prosecute violence against women – without the inclusion of unconstitutional provisions. Our rating Feingold says Trump and Johnson ""oppose a woman’s right to choose and Johnson voted against the Violence Against Women Act."" Trump and Johnson are anti-abortion, though Trump in particular has said he supports exceptions to allow abortion in certain cases. Johnson did vote no on reauthorizing the violence law, but it’s not as though he opposed protections for women; in fact, he voted for alternative measures that did not pass. For a statement that is accurate but needs clarification, our rating is ."
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14117
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"Ohio is ""probably top five in the country, sadly, in terms of heroin overdoses. It’s now exceeded car accidents as the No. 1 cause of death in Ohio."
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"Portman said Ohio is ""probably top five in the country, sadly, in terms of heroin overdoses. It’s now exceeded car accidents as the No. 1 cause of death in Ohio."" He has a point about Ohio having the fifth-most drug overdose deaths in the nation for 2014. But he forgot two key words that make an important distinction about the types of deaths he is counting: ""injury related."" CDC data shows that when you count long-term health problems such as cancer and heart disease, drug poisoning is eighth on the list of things killing Ohioans."
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mixture
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Ohio, Drugs, Health Care, Rob Portman,
|
"Here’s something on which liberals and conservatives can agree: Heroin is bad. The epidemic of drug overdoses has captured media attention on a national scale, and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman is using it to his political advantage. The Republican senator, up for re-election in a tight race, has taken to every platform to push his proposed anecdote, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. The measure, which provides funding for a range of addiction prevention and treatment services, passed in the Senate on March 10. Since then, Portman has spoken about the issue weekly on the Senate floor, on national news networks, and on syndicated radio with pundit Hugh Hewitt. As Hewitt’s guest May 17, Portman said, ""We’re probably top five in the country, sadly, in terms of heroin overdoses. It’s now exceeded car accidents as the No. 1 cause of death in Ohio."" The epidemic seems like it can’t be overstated. But Portman did just that with the omission of a couple of key words. We checked with the Portman campaign, and they linked us to an Ohio Health Department report, 2014 Ohio Drug Overdose Data: General Findings, which counted 2,531 unintentional drug overdoses in 2014, the highest number on record for Ohio. The report said that opioids (prescribed drugs, heroin and fentanyl) were the driving factor behind unintentional drug overdoses in Ohio. The very first line of the report explores how that stacks up to other injury-related deaths. It reads, ""Unintentional drug overdose continued to be the leading cause of injury-related death in Ohio in 2014, ahead of motor vehicle traffic crashes — a trend which began in 2007."" According to Melanie Amato, the department’s spokesperson, the categorization of ""injury-related"" deaths includes incidents such as fatal falls, car accidents, drownings, homicides, and unintentional overdoses. ""Injury-related"" is an important distinction. There are a lot of ways to die that aren’t classified as injury-related. Portman is missing those two key words. We found data from the Centers for Disease Control that determine actual leading cause of death in Ohio in 2014. We made this chart using the agency’s mortality statistics: (Amato explained that the CDC’s number of drug deaths is higher than the health department’s by 213 deaths because the CDC’s definition of ""drug poisoning"" doesn’t distinguish between intentional and unintentional overdoses. The Ohio Department of Health counts intentional overdoses separately, as suicides.) Nationally, CDC data shows that Ohio ranks fifth for states with the most heroin overdose deaths, behind West Virginia, New Mexico, New Hampshire and Kentucky. That means Portman was right about the Buckeye State being in the top five. Portman has used the comparison between lethal overdoses and car crashes before. We scoured his press releases and videotaped statements for other references to the statistic, and found it in at least two more places. Portman got it right on April 7, on the Senate floor, when he said, ""Since 2007, drug overdoses have killed more people in Ohio than any other cause of accidental death, surpassing car accidents."" But another occasion in the Senate, on May 12, he again said, ""The No. 1 cause of death now in my home state of Ohio is not car accidents anymore. It is overdoses. It’s overdoses from prescription drugs and heroin."" Our ruling Portman said Ohio is ""probably top five in the country, sadly, in terms of heroin overdoses. It’s now exceeded car accidents as the No. 1 cause of death in Ohio."" He has a point about Ohio having the fifth-most drug overdose deaths in the nation for 2014. But he forgot two key words that make an important distinction about the types of deaths he is counting: ""injury related."" CDC data shows that when you count long-term health problems such as cancer and heart disease, drug poisoning is eighth on the list of things killing Ohioans.
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25872
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“American coronavirus vaccine killed five Ukrainians.”
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The alleged testing and deaths have not been reported on by any mainstream news organizations. The claim is by a website known for producing pro-Russian disinformation. Two global databases show no testing in Ukraine for a coronavirus vaccine.
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false
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Public Health, Facebook Fact-checks, Coronavirus, Facebook posts,
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"In June, 35% of Americans in one poll said they definitely won’t or probably won’t take a coronavirus vaccine, which has yet to be developed. In the same Fairleigh Dickinson University survey, 28% said they are not confident that a COVID-19 vaccine will be both effective and safe. Then this headline was widely shared on Facebook: ""American coronavirus vaccine killed five Ukrainians."" The headline appeared on a four-paragraph article posted July 18 on News Front, which calls itself a Crimea-based news agency. In 2014, the Crimea region of Ukraine was annexed by Russia, an act the United States considers illegal. The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) We found multiple reports that News Front is known for producing pro-Russian disinformation, but no evidence to back the headline. ""I don’t know of any Americans who have or who are doing COVID-19 vaccine testing in Ukraine,"" Dr. Matthew Laurens of the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health told PolitiFact. As we’ve reported, regarding a possible vaccine: Worldwide, as of early July, there were roughly 160 vaccine projects under way worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Scientists are expressing cautious optimism that a vaccine can be ready to go by the late spring of 2021, although it’s unclear how much longer it would take to distribute the vaccine widely. Five possible vaccines, including one being developed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Cambridge, Mass.-based biotechnology firm Moderna, are in phase 3 clinical trials; once those trials are completed, they would be candidates for approval. Another 12 vaccines have begun phase 2 trials. And more than 100 other vaccines that haven’t begun clinical trials are in the pipeline. No COVID-19 vaccine trials in Ukraine are listed in the federal ClinicalTrials.gov database, which tracks privately and publicly funded clinical studies conducted around the world; and none are listed in the ISRCTN registry, another global research registry. The article claims that, using a vaccine that had not been tested on people in the United States, American virologists tested residents in the area of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. A spokesman for what was identified as the People’s Militia of the LPR was quoted as saying that of 15 people tested, five died ""from complications caused by the infection."" Of the 15 allegedly tested, 10 were said to be from the Ukrainian military, as were four of the dead. LPR, which stands for Luhansk People’s Republic, has asserted governmental authority over a region in eastern Ukraine without the authorization of the government of Ukraine since 2014, according to GlobalSecurity.org, which does research on homeland security and related topics. The ruble has mostly replaced the Ukrainian currency there and ""a strong pro-Russian and anti-Western ideology prevails,"" according to Carnegie Europe, part of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington, D.C. think tank. Our searches of Google and Nexis turned up no mainstream news reports or other authoritative accounts of what was in the article. ""This is an obvious fake,"" Peter Zalmayev, director of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative, told PolitiFact. Based in New York with staff in Ukraine, the group says it ""works to educate the public in the United States about the post-Communist world from the Balkans to Central Asia."" StopFake, a prominent fact-checking organization in Ukraine, reported that other websites in the LPR region and Russian news sites had carried similar articles about the alleged testing and deaths. It labeled the stories fake. ""The entire story is completely made up,"" StopFake reported, based on an interview with a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Armed Forces Medical Service Corps. The spokesperson noted that in recent months, no foreign medical specialists had visited Ukraine’s military. As for News Front, StopFake reported in May that it is ""a pro-Kremlin outlet with a record of publishing conspiratorial stories, including other fake news about the coronavirus."" (The New York Times reported that StopFake, hired earlier this year by Facebook to help curb the flow of Russian propaganda and other news across its platform in Ukraine, is battling accusations of ties to the Ukrainian far right and of bias in its fact-checking, and that the International Fact-Checking Network is conducting an ""interim assessment"" of StopFake. The IFCN is based at the Poynter Institute, which owns PolitiFact.) Other organizations have issued similar warnings about News Front. In August 2019, EUvsDisinfo, which says it responds to Russian disinformation against the EU, wrote that News Front operates from Crimea and ""has always been a reliable source of disinformation. The site... is ambitiously publishing lies in eight languages."" Coda Story, a nonprofit journalism site that focuses on in-depth reporting and fighting disinformation in Eurasia, reported from Crimea in 2018 on the leader of News Front. The pro-Moscow News Front has ""carved out a reputation for its staunchly pro-Kremlin line and a steady output of stories which media monitors such as Stop Fake say are or deliberately inflammatory,"" according to Coda Story. News Front did not reply to our requests for information. With no evidence to back a claim that was made by a source known for disinformation."
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27272
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"A photograph showing an odd-looking, large bat with an elongated face known as a ""hammerhead bat."
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Images of the hammer-headed bat are often met with skepticism, and some viewers claim that this odd-looking creature could be the real-world animal responsible for various sightings of mythical creatures such as the “New Jersey Devil.”
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true
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Fauxtography, animals, bats
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Digital editing has been responsible for the creation of images of some fantastically fictional looking creatures, such as seven-headed snakes, pink-horned rhinos, and impossibly small kittens. In July 2018, many social media users wondered if they were witnessing a similar creation in an image of an odd-looking, large animal said to be a “hammerhead bat”: We have not been able to pinpoint the exact origins of this photograph, but we can say that the hammerhead bat (also known as the “hammer-headed bat”) is a genuine animal that looks like the one pictured here. The hammer-headed bat (Hypsignathus monstrosus) is a megabat found in the tropical forests of central Africa. A profile on the large fruit bat from Bat Magazine provides some more information about this unusual-looking animal: The hammer-headed bat (Hypsignathus monstrosus), widely distributed in equatorial Africa, is one of three species of African fruit bat thought to be asymptomatically infected with the Ebola virus; though scientists do not know if the species is an incidental host or a reservoir of Ebolavirus. The little-collared fruit bat (Myonycteris torquata) and the Egyptian fruit bat (Rousettus aegyptiacus) are the other two species. The species is locally common and is typically found in lowland tropical moist forests, riverine forests, swamp forests, mangroves and palm forests, where it roosts in trees. Although colonies up to 25 bats have been observed, the average hammer-headed fruit bat roost is fewer than five bats. The hammer-headed bat, with wingspans up to 38 inches (97 cm), is Africa’s largest bat. Strong sexual dimorphism is observed in the species, as males are significantly larger than females. Males have a large head with enlarged rostrum, larynx and lips that allows for the production of loud honking calls; the appearance of females is similar to most other fruit bats. The species has a “lek” mating system whereby a few hundred males gather into groups (leks) to attract female mates. Although the hammerhead bat is a relatively large bat, the viral image may have given some viewers a false impression of the animal’s true size. The person holding this fruit bat is extending the animal out toward the camera, and since the bat is closer to the lens than the human, the forced perspective makes the animal appear larger than normal. Photographs exhibiting the forced perspective optical illusion have caused confusion about the relative sizes of frogs, rats, snakes, and half-eaten sharks. As noted by Bats Magazine, the hammer-headed bat can possess a wingspan of nearly 40 inches, but it’s average body length is only about 10 inches: H. monstrosus is the largest bat found in Africa, with males being significantly larger than females. Males range in mass from 228 g to 450 g, averaging 377 g. Females are about half the size, weighing from 218 to 377 g, and averaging 275 g. Males range in length from 220 to 280 mm, with an average of 250 mm. Females measure 195 to 225 mm, averaging 210 mm. Males have a wingspan of 686 to 970 mm, and females have an average wingspan of 840 mm. We’ve collected a few other images of the hammerhead bat for comparison:
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21186
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"Mitt Romney Says Rick Perry wrote a newspaper item saying he was ""open to amnesty"" for illegal immigrants in the United States."
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Romney’s claim leaves the incorrect misimpression Perry is lately open to amnesty, while Perry has said he's against amnesty for years. Featured Fact-check
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mixture
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Immigration, Texas, Mitt Romney,
|
"Assailed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry about undocumented workers who used to mow his lawn, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney shot back: ""You wrote an op-ed (opinion piece) in the newspaper saying you were open to amnesty"" for illegal immigrants. That moment at the Oct. 18, 2011, CNN Republican presidential debate marked continued jousting between the two over illegal immigration. According to a Sept. 11, 2011, news article in the Boston Globe, both hopefuls oppose legislation offering a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, deeming it ""amnesty."" In references to immigration, according to HG.org, a legal information website, amnesty means a ""governmental pardon for violating policies related to immigration. Immigration amnesty would include the federal government forgiving individuals for using false documentation such as Social Security numbers, identification cards, and driver’s licenses, in order to gain employment in the U.S. and continue to remain in the country. Amnesty would allow illegal immigrants or undocumented aliens to gain permanent residency in the United States."" The Globe article also notes that Perry unsuccessfully asked the 2011 Texas Legislature to approve legislation disallowing ""sanctuary cities"" in his state and ensuring police officers could inquire into the immigration status of people they stop. The story says too that Perry opposes the federal DREAM Act, which would open a path to citizenship for certain illegal immigrants who complete two years of college or military service. Republicans haven’t always aligned against amnesty plans. A 1986 measure signed into law by President Ronald Reagan permitted residents illegally in the country before 1982 to work toward legal status. According to a July 2010 report by NPR, nearly 3 million illegal immigrants ultimately took advantage of the opportunity, though critics judged the law a failure at curbing illegal immigration. These days, Perry ranks among candidates who view amnesty as a toxic term. A Sept. 12, 2011, press release from his campaign says that Perry ""believes that Washington must first secure the border before we can have any rational discussion about immigration reform, and he opposes amnesty."" Then again, NumbersUSA, a group that airs concerns about mass immigration, says in a web post updated Sept. 28, 2011, that Perry’s stance on amnesty ""remains unclear. During the (George W.) Bush presidency, Gov. Perry gave mild support to the idea of legalization. But he has spoken against President Obama's various ‘administrative amnesties.’"" That’s a reference to the Obama administration’s declaration it’s applying ""prosecutorial discretion"" to deport some illegal residents and not others. Some factors the government listed in June 2011 as affecting deportations include how long a person has been here, with particular consideration given to his or her legal residency status; if the person came here as a young child; and if he or she has pursued a college degree or served in the military or have immediate relatives who have done so. NumbersUSA also notes Perry’s support for a 2001 Texas law enabling some undocumented residents to pay in-state tuition at colleges and universities. Its entry continues: ""He opposes a congressional-passed amnesty as long as the border is not secure. He says once the border is secure, a conversation about amnesty can start. He does not make it clear where he would stand during such a conversation."" Back to Romney’s debate jab. Did Perry write a piece saying he was open to amnesty? Romney spokesman Ryan Williams sent us a copy of a July 28, 2001, letter from Perry, who had become governor the previous year, to the editor of the Dallas Morning News. In the letter, Perry takes exception to a news story characterizing him as wary of easing the flow of immigrants from Mexico into the United States. That news article, in the July 27, 2001, Morning News, quoted Perry airing reservations about a proposal by the George W. Bush administration to grant permanent legal residency to many undocumented immigrants from Mexico. ""I share the concerns of most Texans and most residents of the United States about an amnesty program,"" the story quoted Perry saying. ""All of those concerns must be addressed in a thoughtful methodical manner."" The article also referred to President Bush saying he didn’t favor unconditional amnesty for immigrants living here illegally. ""Perry said he, too, sees problems in blanket amnesty but that he supports the goal of working with Mexico on having a seamless border,"" the article said. ""‘Having some day in the future a transparent border is an admirable goal and one we should have,’ (Perry) said. ‘With that said, we realize there are problems with health care, education, environment and infrastructure all along the border of Texas and Mexico that we need to address. Until both countries are comfortable that we addressed these concerns, then we need to be cautious and make progress one step at a time.’"" Perry’s subsequent letter of objection to the newspaper said: ""The truth is, I am intrigued and open to the Bush administration's amnesty proposal. Most Texans would agree that it's better to have legal, taxpaying immigrants from Mexico working in the United States than illegal immigrants living in fear of the law and afraid to access basic services."" Perry’s letter also said that if Mexico develops a ""stronger middle class, the goal of a more seamless, transparent border could become a reality. In the meantime,"" his letter said, ""...there are many unanswered questions about how an amnesty plan would be implemented and how it would ultimately impact our state's health care and education systems, as well as other services. Any amnesty proposal must be thoroughly debated and analyzed before implementation and should include input from all border states. Such a plan could benefit our state and countless Mexican families seeking a better life. I applaud President Bush for initiating a public dialogue on this important issue and welcome the opportunity to participate in the development of this initiative."" So, Perry wrote to a newspaper saying he was open to the Bush amnesty proposal, though any proposal would need vetting. News reports show Perry talking down amnesty in later years. In a Dec. 14, 2006, article posted on the website of the Texas governor’s office, Perry said ""neither amnesty nor mass deportation is the answer"" to border security and illegal immigration. ""The first unfairly rewards those who broke our laws, and the latter is not only unrealistic and unenforceable, but it would devastate our economy. That’s why I support a guest worker program that takes undocumented workers off the black market and legitimizes their economic contributions without providing them citizenship status."" His article continues: ""I would rather know who is crossing our border legally to work instead of not knowing who is crossing our border illegally to work. A guest worker program that provides foreign workers with an ID removes the incentive for millions of people to illegally enter our country. It also adds those workers to our tax base, generates revenue for needed social services and it can be done without providing citizenship."" In his January 2007 inaugural address, Perry said: ""We must have a guest-worker program... And we must oppose amnesty because those who come here illegally should not be able to receive citizenship ahead of those who migrate here legally."" He said much the same in his February 2007 State-of-the-State address, telling lawmakers: ""Those who come here illegally should not be rewarded with amnesty."" In August 2007, according to a Houston Chronicle news story, Perry said during a trip to Mexico that he supports a system that would temporarily legalize foreign workers, while making sure they pay taxes and obey the law. Such a system, Perry said then, would allow for a ""free flow of individuals between these countries who want to work, who want to be an asset to our country and to Mexico."" Stumping in Iowa for Rudy Giuliani for president in November 2007, Perry was interrupted when he advocated securing the border and providing non-citizen workers with a tamper-proof ID card, according to a Dallas Morning News recap. In what may have been a reminder that some people see temporary guest-worker schemes as tantamount to amnesty, an audience member said: ""That sounds like amnesty."" In early 2008, Perry stressed border security over immigration reform in an Austin press conference, saying that if a comprehensive overhaul occurs he wants temporary workers who apply for U.S. citizenship to wait their turn behind others who have already done so. ""There's a line. Get in just like everybody else,"" he said, according to an article in the Feb. 1, 2008, Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Our ruling Romney’s claim leaves the incorrect misimpression Perry is lately open to amnesty, while Perry has said he's against amnesty for years. Still, Romney is correct that Perry once wrote a newspaper saying he was open to amnesty, though Perry's 2001 letter spoke only to a particular proposal. The Texan also has aired continued interest in enabling illegal immigrants to become guest workers, an idea that some consider a form of amnesty."
|
128
|
In new headache, WeWork says it found cancer-causing chemical in its phone booths.
|
Cash-strapped WeWork, the office-sharing company that is trying to negotiate a financial lifeline, has a new problem that may prove costly. It has closed about 2,300 phone booths at some of its 223 sites in the United States and Canada after it says it discovered elevated levels of formaldehyde.
|
true
|
Health News
|
The company, which abandoned plans for an initial public offering last month after investors questioned its mounting losses and the way it was being run, said in an email to its tenants on Monday that the chemical could pose a cancer-risk if there is long-term exposure. After a tenant complained of odor and eye irritation, WeWork began testing and based on the results took 1,600 phone booths out of service, the company said in the email to tenants, which it calls members. An additional 700 booths are closed while more testing is conducted, it said. All the phone booths closed were installed over the past several months, WeWork said. “The safety and well-being of our members is our top priority and we are working to remedy this situation as quickly as possible,” WeWork said in a statement. More costs are the last thing needed at the company, which some analysts say is fast running out of cash. WeWork declined to comment on the cost of testing and replacing the booths. It is currently in talks for a multi-billion dollar rescue deal that could lead to its largest shareholder, Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp (9984.T), taking control, two people familiar with the matter said. WeWork is also talking to JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N) over a possible debt package, they said. WeWork declined to identify the manufacturer of the phone booths. “Long-term exposure to formaldehyde, such as that experienced by workers in jobs who experience high concentrations over many years, has been associated with certain types of cancers,” WeWork told tenants in the email. In 1987, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classified formaldehyde as a probable human carcinogen under conditions of unusually high or prolonged exposure. Some studies since then suggested that formaldehyde exposure is associated with certain types of cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute. A tenant, who did not wish to be identified, said she was worried about the risk of cancer as she had spent hundreds of hours inside phone booths at a San Francisco WeWork that has the problem. Phone booths are popular in WeWork’s open-plan offices as they provide privacy and noise reduction, the tenant said.
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34623
|
"Congressman Ryan Zinke is offering an ""ISIS Hunting Tag"" to people who donate to his campaign."
|
Chinese health authorities are trying to identify what is causing an outbreak of pneumonia in the central city of Wuhan, officials said on Friday, as the tally of cases rose to 44 and Singapore said it would screen arrivals on flights from there.
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unproven
|
Uncategorized, ISIS
|
Authorities this week said they were investigating 27 cases of infection after rumors on social media suggested the outbreak could be linked to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The World Health Organization said it was aware of the reports, is monitoring the situation and is in contact with the Chinese government about it. “Investigations are still being carried out and authorities cannot yet confirm what pathogen is causing this illness,” said WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic. He added that there are several potential causes of viral pneumonia, many of which are more common than SARS. Chinese municipal health officials in Wuhan said in a statement on their website on Friday that they had ruled out common respiratory diseases, such as influenza, bird flu and adenovirus infection, as the cause. Eleven of those infected were in critical condition and the rest stable, they said, adding that all had been isolated and doctors were observing 121 people with whom they had been in close contact. Clean-up efforts at a seafood market where some victims were vendors have been completed, the city officials said, adding that no obvious human-to-human transmission had been seen and no medical staff had been infected. On Friday, Singapore’s health ministry said it would begin temperature screening on passengers arriving on flights from Wuhan. In 2003, Chinese officials covered up a SARS outbreak for weeks before a growing death toll and rumors forced the government to reveal the epidemic, apologize and vow full candour regarding future outbreaks. The disease, which emerged in southern China late in 2002, spread rapidly to other cities and countries in 2003. More than 8,000 people were infected and 775 died. Wuhan police this week said they had summoned eight people who “posted and forwarded false information online, causing adverse social impact”.
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14891
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While Americans pray for Paris, the government has acted on mandatory national vaccinations.
|
A meme making the rounds on social media takes a different tack on the Paris terrorist attacks. It claims the tragedy has been a distraction to government efforts to mandate vaccinations for all public schoolchildren. There is a proposal for a similar law, but there has been no movement on the proposal since a week after it was introduced last spring. That’s the last bit of truth to the meme. The rest of the message and implication border on the ludicrous.
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false
|
Georgia, Congress, Public Health, Terrorism, Viral image,
|
"Shots for everyone! Now that’s the kind of sentiment PolitiFact Georgia could get behind. Then we opened the email with that subject line and saw our alert reader meant vaccinations, not Fireball. The question was about a meme that appeared on Facebook and other social media sites in the wake of the terrorist attack in Paris. The wording, over the image of a syringe with a skull inside and the words National Mandatory Vaccinations stamped on top, was awkwardly clear: ""While Americans pray for Paris, France, their government sent HR (House Resolution) 2232 to Congress,"" it read. The implication, of course, is that politicians took advantage of an international tragedy to quickly enact controversial legislation (all with a complicit press). Thank goodness for Internet memes, right? The facts Wrong. To be clear, HR 2232 exists. U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Florida, introduced the Vaccinate All Children Act of 2015 on May 1. Her proposal would restrict the federal government from awarding preventive health service grants to state-level entities unless that state required all public schoolchildren be vaccinated. Exemptions are in place, only for medical reasons. While in theory that means it would remain a state decision to enact vaccination rules for public schools, the federal government’s deep pockets have historically brought states in line. The most famous example was the Reagan administration’s decision in 1984 to use of the Highway Trust Fund to get states to raise the drinking age to 21. States that didn’t comply with the new national standard would see 10 percent of their federal highway funds cut. Eventually, every state agreed – and ensured that what amounted to several million dollars in some places would continue to flow. So while the proposal does not officially make vaccinations mandatory, that would likely be the end result if it were passed into law. Except for one major flaw with the meme. There was no movement on the bill since the massacre in Paris. In fact, there hasn’t been any action on the proposal since the GOP-controlled House assigned it to a subcommittee a week after Wilson introduced it. And there likely won’t be. ""It’s a Democratic bill, and it doesn’t look like a coordinated move by the Democrats,"" said Kerwin Swint, chairman of the political science department at Kennesaw State University. ""This looks like a lone wolf type bill. It hasn’t moved because it’s not going to."" The conspiracy So then why the meme? Several discredited claims about vaccines – most notably the thoroughly debunked link between the shots and autism – reared up again after a measles outbreak traced to Disneyland in California sickened 147 people in the United States. The theme park outbreak – and the first reported American death from measles in 12 years – led to a new law in California that revoked ""personal belief"" exemptions and required all children in public schools without medical reasons to be immunized. ""While I absolutely understand the freedom to say no to healthcare, I don’t think it’s a freedom to extend when it’s to protect your child or to you put others at risk with your choice,"" said Arthur Caplan, the director of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. ""It’s not a bad idea to consider this on a national level."" Pushback and skepticism, though, has been fierce, from everyone from Hollywood celebrities who long objected to immunizations to the two physicians running for the Republican presidential nomination. The anti-vaccination movement is one place where the left and right converge and from that, can move onto greater conspiracies, said Mark Fenster, University of Florida law professor who studies conspiracy theories. The Paris attacks, then, are a ""false flag,"" an operation designed by conspiring forces – this time the media, government and pharmaceutical companies – to distract Americans from the goal of dangerous immunizations. A similar ""false flag"" theory is touted by some in connection with the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. There, the conspiracy goes, the government staged a horrible massacre in a bid to take citizens’ guns. ""The anti-vaccine movement is obsessed with their fear of vaccines, and they view any government effort to require their use as a threat,"" Fenster said. ""Vaccines may have nothing to do with Paris, but the movement views it as a way to ram through this law while no one is watching,"" he added. Our ruling A meme making the rounds on social media takes a different tack on the Paris terrorist attacks. It claims the tragedy has been a distraction to government efforts to mandate vaccinations for all public schoolchildren. There is a proposal for a similar law, but there has been no movement on the proposal since a week after it was introduced last spring. That’s the last bit of truth to the meme. The rest of the message and implication border on the ludicrous."
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35513
|
"A picture shows a 1918 advertisement touting the benefits of the Bell Telephone for maintaining relationships while people were under quarantine during the ""Spanish flu."" "
|
"What's true: A 1900s advertisement from the New York Telephone Company touted the Bell Telephone as a way to maintain social relationships with people who were in quarantine due to illness. What's false: However, this advertisement predates the so-called ""Spanish Flu"" (1918) by roughly eight years."
|
mixture
|
Media Matters, COVID-19
|
In May 2020, as much of the United States was dealing with the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic by self-quarantining, an image started circulating on social media. It supposedly shows an advertisement from the New York Telephone Company that touted the Bell Telephone as a way to maintain relationships with people who were in isolation due to the so-called “Spanish Flu.” One posting of this image from Reddit was accompanied by a caption that noted history really does repeat itself: An add [sic] during the 1918 Spanish Flu and here we are approximately 100 years later. History does repeat itself. The advertisement reads: When In Quarantine: People who are in quarantine are not isolated if they have a Bell Telephone. The Bell Service brings cheer and encouragement to the sick, and is of value in countless other ways. Friends, whether close at hand or far away, can be easily reached, because Bell Service is universal service. This is a genuine advertisement from the New York Telephone Company touting the benefits of a phone to maintain social distancing. However, the ad was first published several years before the outbreak of the Spanish flu. Here’s a version of this advertisement published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Nov. 17, 1910:
|
28580
|
Scientists have found a drug that regenerates teeth, and it could leave dentists without work.
|
What's true: An experimental procedure combining a drug previously investigated in Alzheimer's clinical trials and a biodegradable sponge has shown promise in its ability to stimulate dentin growth. What's false: So far, this procedure has only been tested on mice, and it is unlikely to make dentistry an obsolete profession.
|
mixture
|
Medical, dentin, dentistry, enamel
|
On 9 January 2017, a team of scientists published the results of an experimental treatment for dental cavities in the journal Scientific Reports: Here we describe a novel, biological approach to dentine restoration that stimulates the natural formation of reparative dentine via the mobilisation of resident stem cells in the tooth pulp. Dentin is the primary mineral that makes up teeth, found in layers beneath the tooth’s protective enamel. Cavities occur when bacteria break through this protective enamel and degrade the dentin below. The central problem with treating dental caries is the fact that, at present, there is no way to regenerate anything outside of a very specific kind of dentin (tertiary dentin) that serves only to provide a thin protective layer, and does not fill in the cavity itself. To create anything past this thin layer of tertiary dentin, the stem cells present in the teeth need to be activated in such a way as to produce enough tertiary dentin to actually fill in the damaged tooth. The researchers attempted to solve this problem with the use of a class of chemicals (glycogen synthase kinase (GSK-3) antagonists) already investigated as a treatment for Alzheimer’s. To put it in broad brushstrokes, these chemicals overstimulate signals in the body meant to trigger restorative processes. The researchers combined these chemicals with a biodegradable sponge to serve as a sort of scaffolding for the mineral growth, as described in a King’s College, London press release: Using biodegradable collagen sponges to deliver the treatment, the team applied low doses of small molecule glycogen synthase kinase (GSK-3) inhibitors to the tooth. They found that the sponge degraded over time and that new dentine replaced it, leading to complete, natural repair. Collagen sponges are commercially-available and clinically-approved, again adding to the potential of the treatment’s swift pick-up and use in dental clinics. An additional benefit, according to lead researcher Paul Sharpe, is that one of the chemicals investigated — Tideglusib — has already been tested in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s research: Using a drug that has already been tested in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease provides a real opportunity to get this dental treatment quickly into clinics. Numerous outlets reported on the finding, with some going as far as to claim that it could “leave dentists without work”. Besides the fact that a dentist would still need to perform this procedure, the results need to be tempered by the fact that, at the moment, they have been performed only on mouse teeth, and that clinical trials still need to be performed before the procedure could be put to use on humans.
|
34158
|
A San Francisco mural portrait of Greta Thunberg used 700 gallons of spray paint.
|
Scott told Snopes that One Atmosphere had also sought to neutralize any effects caused by the Thunberg mural through the use of carbon offsets. He wrote: “We purchased carbon offsets that will cover far more than the small footprint left by the limited number of spray cans used on our project.”
|
false
|
Science
|
In November 2019, we received multiple inquiries from readers about widely shared social media posts claiming irony or hypocrisy at work in the production of a massive San Francisco mural in honor of the young climate activist Greta Thunberg. On Nov. 8, the right-leaning social media activist Brandon Straka tweeted a link to a KPIX-TV article about the mural, adding his own view that, “The leftist geniuses in San Francisco have decided to send a message about climate change by creating a 6 story [sic] mural of Greta Thunberg using 700 gallons of aerosol spray paint.” The leftist geniuses in San Francisco have decided to send a message about climate change by creating a 6 story mural of Greta Thunberg using 700 gallons of aerosol spray paint. 🤣 https://t.co/LdJj2i3j99 — Brandon Straka (@BrandonStraka) November 9, 2019 The text of Straka’s tweet, and screenshots of it, were further promulgated by multiple users on Facebook. The KPIX-TV article to which he linked did not contain any reference to the paint used by Argentinian artist Andrés Pereoselli (known as “Cobre”) in creating the Thunberg mural. As such, it did not provide any evidence to support Straka’s key claim, that the portrait of the climate activist required 700 gallons of aerosol spray paint. It’s not clear where that figure came from, but it might have originated in an article on the right-leaning website The Blaze, which wrote: “While it is unclear how many spray cans [Cobre] has used, the mural spans four stories and at least one smaller project utilized 500 cans of the paint scientists say can generate asthma-inducing smog.” The Daily Wire, another right-leaning website, subsequently extrapolated that “the Thunberg mural will likely take closer to 700 cans to finish.” In response to concerns about the use of aerosol spray paint, One Atmosphere, a California environmental non-profit group that collaborated with Cobre on the mural, posted the following explanation to Instagram on Nov. 11: Some folks have been asking about the environmental impacts of the Greta mural. Read on for some details. The vast majority of the paint is water-based acrylic exterior paint that was rolled onto the building by hand. The finishing details can only be done with spray paint, but we are using spray cans without CFCs. (CFCs are tremendously damaging to the environment). We are using low pressure cans with a minimal footprint. The cans and the boxes will also be recycled, although many of the cans will first have a second life as part of a separate art project. The cans have been picked up and delivered in an electric vehicle, and the artist and organizers have been travelling almost exclusively by way of electric car, electric scooter or on foot to the project site. The lift being used is also electric, not diesel. We are doing our best to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order! After the completion of the project, One Atmosphere’s Executive Director Paul Scott provided further details to Snopes in an email. He firmly rejected the claim that the project required 700 gallons, or even 700 cans, of spray paint. In reality, Scott said he counted a total of 117 used 400-ml cans of spray paint, almost all of them from the MTN 94 brand. That’s just over 12 gallons in total. However, only some of that 400-ml capacity is taken up by the hydrocarbon propellant that escapes into the atmosphere (as opposed to the liquid paint, which ends up on the side of the building). All aerosol spray paints use a propellant to help disperse the paint from the can and onto its intended surface. In the past, manufacturers used chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), chemicals that were widely banned from the late 1980s onwards due to the fact that they deplete the ozone layers in the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. In the United States in 2019, spray paint manufacturers use hydrocarbons such as propane and butane as propellants. Unlike CFCs, hydrocarbons don’t have a deleterious effect on ozone, but they do have a small effect on global warming. However, it’s worth putting the scale of that effect into some context, using a measure known as Global Warming Potential. As the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) explains on its website: “The Global Warming Potential (GWP) was developed to allow comparisons of the global warming impacts of different gases. Specifically, it is a measure of how much energy the emissions of 1 ton of a gas will absorb over a given period of time, relative to the emissions of 1 ton of carbon dioxide (CO2). The larger the GWP, the more that a given gas warms the Earth compared to CO2 over that time period.” The CFCs used as propellants in aerosol paint in the past have a GWP of between 5,000 and 14,000. Propane, a hydrocarbon commonly used now as a propellant in spray paint, has a GWP of 4. In his email to Snopes, Scott added that, “The amount of the propellant is also less because the cans are lower pressure, and obviously only a portion of each can is propellant, so the ultimate GWP impact of the cans we used is very limited.”
|
8061
|
Detroit mayor sounds statewide alarm as coronavirus cases surge.
|
A surge in coronavirus cases in Detroit has put Michigan on track to be one of the U.S. states hardest hit by the pandemic, the city’s mayor said on Thursday, adding that hospitals were scrambling to increase capacity.
|
true
|
Health News
|
As the U.S. death toll from the virus passed 1,000 people, hospitals and government authorities in New York, New Orleans and other hot spots have grappled with a rush of cases and a shortage of supplies, staff and sick beds. In Detroit, which had no cases about two weeks ago, the number had grown to 868 confirmed cases and 15 deaths as of midday on Thursday, the city’s chief public health officer, Denise Fair, said on a webcast briefing. Statewide, Michigan authorities have so far reported 2,856 cases and 60 deaths, according to data compiled by Reuters. That puts it behind New York’s more than 37,000 cases and 385 deaths, but closer to New Jersey and California. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said the surge in newly confirmed cases in and around the city, partially attributable to expanded testing, was “really concerning”. Michigan was on pace to be among the top three states in the country in confirmed cases, and soon to surpass California, he said. “We are preparing as if we get the kind of surge that New York had,” Duggan said at the briefing, adding that the city’s focus was on expanding capacity to treat the illness. He admonished people to stop gathering in groups in violation of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order, which took effect on Tuesday. Detroit authorities are hoping to expand drive-up testing from 100 slots beginning on Friday to up to 500 starting next week, which would require a doctor’s prescription based on symptoms and an appointment. Still, there is a mass shortage of tests. “There is no question there are thousands and thousands of people in this state who have the virus. We’re just not testing them,” Duggan said. Many clinics were turning away people who complained of fever, shortness of breath and other related symptoms, and under-resourced hospitals were advising individuals not facing emergency conditions to remain at home in quarantine. Aside from occasional food shoppers and dog walkers, the streets of downtown Detroit were nearly deserted Thursday. Brandon Allen, 48, bought groceries in midtown Detroit to drop off for his 72-year-old mother, who he said had tested positive for coronavirus several days ago. Along with the food, he brought her a bouquet of flowers. “I told her my project, from me to you, is to keep these flowers alive,” Allen said. “She’s over there alone. She opened the garage door and I dropped them outside the door. We had to wave at each other through the window,” Allen said. Allen, who was expecting the birth of a daughter next week, said he was worried about “bringing a baby into this pandemic” and criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis. “You hear the stuff that he says and you just know you have to fend for yourself. He has no compassion,” Allen said.
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